The Silence E-Book

Gillian Clarke

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

Seitenzahl: 35

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Beschreibung

A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024 'The days have no names. The day they count the dead, the day they closed the doors, turned off the lights. We're still here in the silence, hearing tree-talk, the wind's secrets, the company of birds.' ('The Year of the Dead') The poems in Gillian Clarke's The Silence begin during lockdown, to whose silences Clarke listens so attentively that other voices emerge. As the book progresses, that silence deepens, in the poems about her mother and childhood, about the Great War and its aftermaths, and in her continuing attention to Welsh places and names, and the rituals which make that world come in to focus. In these scrupulous, musical poems, Clarke finds consolation in how silence makes room for memory and for the company of the animal- and bird-life which surrounds us. These poems, compulsively returning to key images and formative moments, echo and bring back other ways of living to the book's present moment.

Leseprobe

THE SILENCE

Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and ran poetry workshops in primary and secondary schools and for M.Phil. students at the University Of Glamorgan. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers’ centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. She was the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. Her poetry is studied by GCSE students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and lives with her architect husband on an eighteen-acre smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they have planted 4,300 trees and care for the land according to conservation practice.

also by gillian clarke from carcanet

Roots Home

Zoology

Ice

A Recipe for Water

At the Source

Making the Beds for the Dead

Five Fields

Collected Poems

Selected Poems

Letter from a Far Country

The King of Britain’s Daughter

Letting in the Runour

Acknowledgements

‘The Hours’ was first pulished as a pamphlet by Broken Sleep Books (2021).

Versions of six poems from The Silence were set as an oratorio by Marco Galvani of the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music.

First published in Great Britain in 2024 byCarcanetAlliance House, 30 Cross StreetManchester, M2 7AQwww.carcanet.co.uk

Text copyright © Gillian Clarke 2024

The right of Gillian Clarke to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Design and Patents Act of 1988; all rights reserved.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Ebook ISBN: 978 1 80017 393 4

The publisher acknowledges financial assistance from Arts Council England.

CONTENTS

Blood Moon

The Year of the Dead

The Hours

Matins

Lauds

Prime

Terce

Sext

Nones

Vespers

Compline

Song

Spring Equinox, 2020

A Spring Morning

The Silence

Spring Equinox, 2021

Today

Bluebells

A Fallen Ash Tree

Wild Laburnum

The Breath of Trees

Red

Fox and Hare

Us

What time is it?

Late June

Midsummer

What Day is it?

Heat

July

This Morning

Storwm Awst

Listening

September

October

Water Talk

November

December

Winter Sunset

Christmas Eve

Witch-Hazel

Broken

Snow

Blackbird

Afterwards

Then

A Box of Gloves

Nurse

Gwenllian

Llywelyn’s Daughter

Flintstone

Caernarfon

Sense

Scent

Touch

Taste

Sound

An Egret at Portmeirion

Offa’s Dyke

Was it for this?’

Shaping the Invisible

Sounding

The Starling

Thistle Butterflies, Villa Saraceno

A Bird in the Hand

Gŵyl y Gelli

Gorse

Fforest

Crossing the Irish Sea

Seals at Aberfforest

Taking You There

Epilogue

THE SILENCE

Blood Moon

691 and 21 January 2019

‘A’r lleuat a ymchawlawd yn waedawl lliw’

‘And the moon turned to the colour of blood’

Brut y Tywysogion

Black sky of stars and a risen moon

in the sleeping arms of the beech.

We set the alarm for four, sleep curled

against the ice-cold night as moon and world

work their magnetism, oceans drawn

and let go by the luminous old stone.

Tonight we wake to watch our shadow

bite the edge, spread, darkening,

till the moon is blood, light lost

like all we touch, the poles, the oceans,

the wounded wilderness, the apple picked in Eden

bleeding from the bite of our first sin.

The Year of the Dead

January 2020

We wake with the sun

follow its golden hours,

watch each day’s dissolve

into dusk, nightfall, sleep.

The days have no names.

The day they count the dead,

the day they closed the doors,

turned off the lights.

We’re still here in the silence,

hearing tree-talk,

the wind’s secrets,

the company of birds.

The Hours

‘And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: but the end is not yet. There shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places. All these are the beginning of sorrows.’

St Benedict’s Hours of the Day, Sixth Century

matins

The early hours, a week before full moon,

I lie awake, remember the young fox

calling as it crossed the lawn last night;

how it came close to the glass

dipped its head to drink our gift:

the moon in a bowl of water.