Making the Beds for the Dead E-Book

Gillian Clarke

• Herausgeber: Carcanet Poetry
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

The title sequence of Making the Beds for the Dead charts the journey of the Foot and Mouth virus in 'the plague year'. Come from outer space, it travels - on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard - into the very heart of our lives. The poet includes personal, verses and stories from farmers in her family and neighbourhood. The open structure allows Gillian Clarke to include her seven rock poems, written for the National Botanic Garden of Wales; her poems based in archaeology; and her poems about war, and urban violence. There is an instinctive and a deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book. The poet remains true to her landscapes and her nation. The sequence 'The Physicians of Myddfai', nine sonnets for Aberglasne, and much else is included in this characteristically generous and engaging volume by Wales' best-loved poet.

Leseprobe

GILLIAN CLARKE

Making the Beds for the Dead

For Catrin, Owain and Dylan, a Dafydd, fel arfer

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements are due to the following where some of these poems, or versions of them, first appeared: The New Welsh Review; Planet; PN Review; North; Wading through Deep Water: Parkinson’s Disease Charity Anthology, edited by Tony Curtis (Edge Press, 2001); BBC Radio 4; to Andrew Sclater for commissioning poems for Bioverse: Poems for the National Botanic Garden of Wales (HarperCollins, 2000), from which the first seedlings of ‘The Stone Poems’, ‘The Middleton Poems’ and ‘The Physicians of Myddfai’ have grown; to William Wilkins and Aberglasne for commissioning ‘Nine Green Gardens’ (Gomer Press, 2000); Colman Getty; The Epic Poise: A Celebration of Ted Hughes, edited by Nick Gamage (Faber, 1999); The Way You Say the World: A Celebration for Anne Stevenson, edited by John Lucas and Matt Simpson (Shoestring Press, 2003); the Hay Festival of Literature; Poetry Proms, BBC Radio 3.

Special thanks are due to the Arts Council of Wales for the Creative Wales Award which helped me to write this book.

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

In the Beginning

A Woman Sleeping at a Table

Mother Tongue

The Poet’s Ear

The Fisherman

The Piano

Erik Satie and the Blackbird

The Flood Diary

RS

The Painter

The Stone Poems

Rock

Hay

Granite

Slate

Edward Llwyd and the Trilobite

Landfall

Woman Washing her Hair

The Stone Hare

Coal

Mesozoic

The Middleton Poems

The Ice-House

Ice Harvest

Plumbing

A Banquet at Middleton

The Great Glasshouse

The Olive Grove

El Niño in the Walled Garden

The Physicians of Myddfai

Llyn-y-Fan Fach

Legend

Healers

Nine Green Gardens

The Yew Tunnel in Winter

The Parapet Walk

The Cloister Garden

A Sad Story

Church Wood

The Upper Walled Garden

The Lower Walled Garden

The Pool Garden

The Stream Garden

Adders

Counting Tigers

Breathing

Taxidermy

Front Page

On the Train

A Death in the Village

Stranger on a Train

Someone

Perfecting the Art

The Night War Broke

Tomatoes

Making the Beds for the Dead

Ewe

Wethers

Sheep and Goats

Flight

Virus

Silence

Carlisle

On the Move

No Entry

First Lamb

Lamb on a Mobile Phone

Rumour

Plague

Marsh Fritillary

Hywel’s Story

Family

Cull

Pigs

Woolmark

The Vet

Fox

September 2001

The Fall

Three Minutes

Shepherd

Blackface

On Banc Blaen Cwrt

Birthday

Aftermath

Flood

About the Author

Also by Gillian Clarke

Copyright

In the Beginning

‘on her 7th birthday’

Holy Bible – the King James version,

soft black leather cover,

tissue pages edged in gold.

I loved the maps, the names: Jerusalem.

Askelon. The Wilderness of Shur.

And the old photographs:

caught by a camera in black and white,

women drawing water at a well,

a fisherman on the Sea of Galilee

blurred people scything corn,

mountains sharp, stone still forever.

I see it all in colour, a girl my age

two thousand years ago, or sixty years,

or now in a desert land at war, squatting

among the sheaves, arms raised,

threshing grain with a flail.

Threshing with a flail. That’s it. Words

from another language, a narrative of spells

in difficult columns on those moth-thin pages,

words to thrill the heart with a strange music,

words like flail, and wilderness,

and in the beginning.

A Woman Sleeping at a Table

by Vermeer

1657. The house in Delft.

Windfalls in a bowl.

See her wake, take

an apple in one hand,

a knife in the other.

The apple has fallen

from the tree in Eden.

They are mapping the round earth,

discovering geography, astronomy,

She holds the world in her hand.

The apple turns

under the fixed stars.

Her knife cuts into the Pole

and peels the fruit in a single

ringlet of skin.

Undressed to its equator

it is half moonlight.

Then all white, naked, whole,

she slices to the star-heart

for the four quarters of the moon.

Mother Tongue

You’d hardly call it a nest,

just a scrape in the stones,

but she’s all of a dither

warning the wind and sky

with her desperate cries.

If we walk away

she’ll come home quiet

to the warm brown pebble

with its cargo of blood and hunger,

where the future believes in itself,

and the beat of the sea

is the pulse of a blind

helmeted embryo afloat

in the twilight of the egg,

learning the language.