Gillian Clarke

Collected Poems

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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.
This book is currently unavailable
112 printed pages
Original publication
2011
Publication year
2011
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Quotes

  • ravinduhas quoted8 years ago
    Journey

    As far as I am concerned
    We are driving into oblivion.
    On either side there is nothing,
    And beyond your driving
    Shaft of light it is black.
    You are a miner digging
    For a future, a mineral
    Relationship in the dark.
    I can hear the darkness drip
    From the other world where people
    Might be sleeping, might be alive.
    Certainly there are white
    Gates with churns waiting
    For morning, their cream standing.
    Once we saw an old table
    Standing square on the grass verge.
    Our lamps swept it clean, shook
    The crumbs into the hedge and left it.
    A tractor too, beside a load
    Of logs, bringing from a deeper
    Dark a damp whiff of the fungoid
    Sterility of the conifers.
    Complacently I sit, swathed
    In sleepiness. A door shuts
    At the end of a dark corridor.
    Ahead not a cat’s eye winks
    To deceive us with its green
    Invitation. As you hurl us
    Into the black contracting
    Chasm, I submit like a blind
    And folded baby, being born.
  • abhiramhas quoted8 years ago
    Fierce confrontation, the tight
    Red rope of love which we bot
  • abhiramhas quoted8 years ago
    Tightening about my life,
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