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 a former 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. She was appointed the National Poet of Wales in 2008.
Description
Contents First Words A Pocket Dictionary Glas y Dorlan Not Otter The Fox and the Girl Sgwarnop Nettles A T-Mail to Keats Fflam The Ledbury Muse A Recipe for Water Severn A Barge on the Severn Source Sabrina Ice Tide Bore Barrage Migrations Mumbai Man in a Shower At the Banganga Tank In the Taj Laundry Hands Post Script Glacier Reader's Digest Atlas of the World City Afon Taf Architect Coins Llandaf Cathedral Sleepless Subway The Rising Tide Welsh Stadium Wing Number Letting the Light In House of Dreams A Sonnet for Nye Mercury Welsh Gold Horsetail Kites Death's Head Hawkmoth Caterpillar Oradour-sur-Glane Singer Storm over Limousin Landscape with Farm The Accompanist Bach at St Davids Cattle, Hayfield, Storm Gravity Wings Pegging Out Love at Livebait Revival Castell y Bere Old Libraries The Oak Wood Library Chair Quayside Farewell Finisterre December Cae Delyn Advent The Darkest Day Solstice Shepherd
Reviews
'Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power...her work is personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Clarke's mellifluous new collection [A Recipe for Water] is her first since her appointment as Wales's national poet in 2008. The drop of water on the tongue, she tells us, 'was the first word in the world', and it's through water that these poems give up their stories: history is written into the Arctic's ice; myths well up from river sources; the currents on the ocean wash culture and heritage onto our shores. Watery collections have poured forth from the pens of poets from Sean O'Brien to Maura Dooley in recent years; anticipation is high for Clarke's contribution to the pool'. - Sarah Crown, the Guardian, 3 January 2009