The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarkes first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops.
Gillian Clarkes poems ring with lucidity and power[...] her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical, the Times Literary Supplement said. She combines traditional skills with an original voice and outlook, and with a history which includes the unwritten stories of Welsh women. Her Selected Poems has proven one of the most popular volumes of modern Welsh poetry, having gone through seven printings in a dozen years. Her language has a quality both casual and intense, mundane and visionary, the Listener said of Letter from a Far Country. There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead, the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems subjects their own unbullied reality.
Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poems. Collected Poems includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date.
Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has taught creative writing in primary and secondary schools and at university level. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Since 1994 she has been a tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Clarke was the inaugural Capital Poet for Cardiff 2005-6. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and now lives with her architect husband on a smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they raise a small flock of sheep, and care for the land according to organic and conservation practice.
Carcanet has published her Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The King of Britains Daughter (1993), Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998) and Making the Beds for the Dead (2004).
from The Sundial
The Sundial
Journey
Snow on the Mountain
Blaen Cwrt
Baby-Sitting
Calf
Nightride
Catrin
Still Life
Storwm Awst
Death of a Young Woman
Swinging
Lunchtime Lecture
Dyddgu Replies to Dafydd
At Ystrad Fflûr
Railway Tracks
Foghorns
Curlew
Burning Nettles
Last Rites
Harvest at Mynachlog
Clywedog
Choughs
St Thomas’s Day
from Letter from a Far Country
White Roses
Return to Login
Miracle on St David’s Day
East Moors
Scything
Jac Codi Baw
Ram
Buzzard
Friesian Bull
Sunday
Taid’s Funeral
Letter from a Far Country
Kingfishers at Condat
Seamstress at St Léon
Les Grottes
Heron at Port Talbot
Suicide on Pentwyn Bridge
Plums
Death of a Cat
Cardiff Elms
Sheila na Gig at Kilpeck
Siege
Lly^r
Blodeuwedd
Shadows in Llanbadarn
The Water-Diviner
from Selected Poems
Syphoning the Spring
A Dream of Horses
October
Climbing Cader Idris
Castell y Bere
Today
Taid’s Grave
Tadzekistan
Shearing
from Letting in the Rumour
At One Thousand Feet
Neighbours
Windmill
Listening for Trains
Storm
Seal
Ichthyosaur
Cold Knap Lake
Apples
Oranges
Fires on Lly^n
Talking of Burnings in Walter Savage Landor’s Smithy
Border
Post Script
Marged
Overheard in County Sligo
Shawl
My Box
Falling
Roadblock
Binary
The Hare
Hare in July
Trophy
The Rothko Room
Red Poppy
February
Gannet
Night Flying
In January
Tory Party Conference, Bournemouth, 1986
Times like These
Slate Mine
Roofing
Hearthstone
Pipistrelle
Fulmarus Glacialis
Racing Pigeon
Magpie in Snow
Tawny Owl
Peregrine Falcon
Clocks
Cofiant
from The King of Britain’s Daughter
Blood
Musician
The Listeners
Anorexic
The Vet
Baltic
Hölderlin in Tubingen
The Poet
Wild Sound
Swimming with Seals
Lurcher
Lament
No Hands
Olwen Takes Her First Steps on the Word Processor in Time of War
