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- Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
Gillian Clarke's poems are letters from the far countries of personal and ancestral memories, of places and moments of insight. Her acclaimed title poem explores the buried histories of women's lives, the enduring responsibilities that link generations and ensure the continuance of language and traditions. Rooted in rural Wales, Letter from a Far Country celebrates the sources of strength and continuity that bind people to landscape and community.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011
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GILLIAN CLARKE
Letter from a Far Country
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgement is due to the editors of the following publications in which some of these poems first appeared: Poetry Wales, Arcade, Poetry Review, The New Statesman, The Honest Ulsterman, Madog, P.N. Review, Pequod, The Chimaera Press, The Kilpeck Anthology (Five Seasons Press), Poems for Shakespeare 9, Yr Academi Gymreig / The Welsh Academy. Acknowledgement is also due to the Welsh Arts Council and BBC Wales for commissioning and broadcasting the title poem.
Contents
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Letter from a Far Country
Miracle on St. David’s Day
Insomnia
Chalk Pebble
Sunday
East Moors
Scything
Bluetit and Wren
Llŷr
Blodeuwedd
Siege
Cardiff Elms
The Water Diviner
Hay-Making
Harvest
Friesian Bull
Jac Codi Baw
Taid’s Funeral
White Roses
Pendzhikent
Login
Blodeuyn
Death of a Cat
Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck
Plums
Balsam
Buzzard
Ram
From Clarence Bridge, Newport
Heron at Port Talbot
Mrs Frost
Ice Queen
Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge
Welsh Blacks
On Rhiwbina Hill
Shadows in Llanbadarn
A Journal from France
September 9th
The Village
La Cirque de Paris
Seamstress at St. Léon
Kingfishers at Condat
Rouffignac
Font de Gaume
Les Combarelles
‘Summer’s going quickly now’
Notes
About the Author
Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press
Copyright
Letter from a Far Country
They have gone. The silence resettles
slowly as dust on the sunlit
surfaces of the furniture.
At first the skull itself makes
sounds in any fresh silence,
a big sea running in a shell.
I can hear my blood rise and fall.
Dear husbands, fathers, forefathers,
this is my apologia, my
letter home from the future,
my bottle in the sea which might
take a generation to arrive.
The morning’s all activity.
I draw the detritus of a family’s
loud life before me, a snow plough,
a road-sweeper with my cart of leaves.
The washing machine drones
in the distance. From time to time
as it falls silent I fill baskets
with damp clothes and carry them
into the garden, hang them out,
stand back, take pleasure counting
and listing what I have done.
The furniture is brisk with polish.
On the shelves in all of the rooms
I arrange the books
in alphabetical order
according to subject: Mozart,
Advanced Calculus, William,
and Paddington Bear.
Into the drawers I place your clean
clothes, pyjamas with buttons
sewn back on, shirts stacked neatly
under their labels on the shelves.
The chests and cupboards are full,
the house sweet as a honeycomb.
I move in and out of the hive
all day, harvesting, ordering.
You will find all in its proper place,
When I have gone.
As I write I am far away.
First see a landscape. Hill country,
essentially feminine,
the sea not far off. Its blues
widen the sky. Bryn Isaf
down there in the crook of the hill
under Calfaria’s single eye.
My grandmother might have lived there.
Any farm. Any chapel.
Father and minister, on guard,
close the white gates to hold her.
A stony track turns between
ancient hedges, narrowing,
like a lane in a child’s book.
Its perspective makes the heart restless
like the boy in the rhyme, his stick
and cotton bundle on his shoulder.
The minstrel boy to the war has gone.
But the girl stays. To mind things.
She must keep. And wait. And pass time.
There’s always been time on our hands.
We read this perfectly white page
for the black head of the seal,
for the cormorant, as suddenly gone
as a question from the mind,
snaking underneath the surfaces.
A cross of gull shadow on the sea
