Gillian Clarke

Lament for the Fallen

Gododdin

The European winters of 2009 and 2010 serve as inspiration for the evocative poems in this collection that anxiously yet joyfully unite the seasons and creatures of the planet. The extremity of those record-setting winters in the UK redefined all seasons for the poet, and her notion that nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination is conveyed in poems such as “Polar,” in which a polar bear rug transforms personal and ecological longing into a creative act. The compilation presents commissioned pieces written during the author’s time as National Poet of Wales, including poems for Haiti and Guardian features for Christmas and Valentine’s Day.

Based on the story of Branwen, daughter of Llŷr (from the Mabinogion).

The King of Britain's Daughter

The first English translation by a poet of one of Britain's oldest cultural treasures, which captures its compelling 'word-music' The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year 600AD. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the English, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down by two medieval scribes. It is comprised of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell, and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics. Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke is the first poet to create a translation. She animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today.

The Gododdin

At the Source reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets. Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet's imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer's year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.

A Writer's Year

At the Source

The Map and the Clock is a celebration of the most scintillating poems ever composed on our islands. Curated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and by Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, this anthology gathers fourteen centuries of extraordinary verse - beginning with the first writings from the old languages of England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and culminating in some of our most recent poets, speaking in our present-day tongues. Many of our founding myths and legends are told here - King Arthur and Gawain, Beowulf and Mad Sweeney, the Mabinogion - as are the nursery-tales and songs we still sing today. Through these pages we witness the tragedy of European wars and world conflict; we court romance and friendship; we explore nationhood and belonging, identity and belief; and we are welcomed to a celebration of the cultural diversity of the poetries of our twenty-first century. The Map and the Clock is a stunning and essential treasury of the poems that have moulded our languages, examined our worlds, and shaped our islands through time.

A Laureate's Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland

The Map and the Clock

Selected Poems gathers together the best of Gillian Clarke's poetry in a single volume. National Poet of Wales, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award, Clarke is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today, as well as one of the most popular poets on the school curriculum. Over the past four decades her work has examined nature, womanhood, art, music, Welsh history - and always with the lyric and imagistic precision by which her poetry is instantly recognisable. But perhaps her greatest inspiration is the Welsh landscape and all the human stories that it hosts: as UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has said, 'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths'. Selected Poems shows the great compass and interdependence of those two domains, and presents the finest work from one of the most important figures in poetry today.

Selected Poems

A collection of poems about the supernatural, by such authors as Tennyson, Robert Frost, and Jack Prelutsky.

Haunted Poems

The Whispering Room

Owen Sheers

Geraint Jones

Jon Gower

Robert Minhinnick

Dan Llywelyn Hall

Eric Ngalle Charles

Sian Melangell Dafydd

Menna Elfyn

clare e potter

Laura Wainwright

Mary Gladys Coles

To coincide with the 50th anniversary of Offa's Dyke Path, a publication published by Ravenmade, featuring 12 newly commissioned poems & Dan's collection of paintings has been launched. The bilingual book features an introduction by Jon Gower and poetry by: Ifor ap Glyn (Poet Laureate of Wales), Gillian Clarke, Eric Ngalle Charles, Menna Elfyn, Robert Minhinnick, Oliver Lomax, Sian Melangell Dafydd, Owen Sheers, Laura Wainwright, Geriant Jones, clare e. potter and Gladys Mary Coles all inspired by Offa's Dyke.

Poetry and paintings inspired by Offa's Dyke

Walking with Offa / Cerdded gydag Offa

The Sundial

Carol Ann Duffy

Curated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy and Gillian Clarke, the National Poet of Wales, this new anthology gathers from centuries of essential poems. The editors have drawn on the rich languages of these islands, starting with the very first poets whose names we know - Taliesin and Aneirin, who composed in Welsh and Old Brythoneg in what is now Scotland - 'to begin at the beginning', to explore the poetry of Ireland and the British Isles in order to tell our story across the ages in this beautiful, vital treasury.

Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose 'heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us 'in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. 'Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, 'where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb 'birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby 'in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. 'Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that 'flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: 'a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'. "Gillian Clarke is one of the most widely respected and deeply loved poets in the world." CAROL ANN DUFY

Zoology

Justin Todd

In the desolate depths of a perilous place the bogeyman lurks, with a snarl on his face. Never dare, never dare to approach his dark lair for he's waiting . . . just waiting . . . to get you.—Jack Prelutsky, excerpt from The Bogeyman Offering a mix of contemporary and classic verse as well as traditional rhymes, the poets featured in this anthology include Carl Sandburg, Ted Hughes, Emily Bronte, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Stevie Smith, Walter de la Mare, and William Shakespeare. Ghosts, goblins, witches, bats, bogeymen, mysterious night noises, sprites, spirits, and more—they're all here in this anthology of terrifically terrifying poems. Wonderfully weird and eerie illustrations add to the haunted mood.

The Kingfisher Book of Scary Poems

The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's 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 Clarke's 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.

Collected Poems

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.

Making the Beds for the Dead

The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year 600AD. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the English, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down by two medieval scribes. It is comprised of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell, and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics. Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke is the first poet to create a translation. She animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today.

Gillian Clarke

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