Wed 5th April
On Wednesday April 5th we met at Diana’s house to discuss the work of Gillian Clarke.
Geoff read the rest of chapter 4 of ‘Thorkil’ which included a bloodthirsty account of a Viking raid on an Irish village and revealed more of the ruthless skulduggery of Freydan, Thorkil’s uncle.
Diana then informed us about the life of Gillian Clarke how she was born in 1937 in Penarth, an elegant seaside town with a Victorian pier. She now lives in Ceredigion. Although they were both Welsh speakers her parents brought her up speaking only English. As a form of rebellion she learned to speak Welsh when she became an adult. She has written a variety of work including oratorios, plays and translations as well as a large body of poetry. She has translated from Welsh to English. National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016 and co-founded ‘Ty Newydd’ the Writer’s Centre in North Wales in 1990, of which she is now President. In 2010 she was awarded “the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards and she was awarded The Wilfred Owen Association Poetry Award in 2012.
‘Y Gododdin’ by Aneurin is claimed to be the oldest surviving named Welsh poem. It was based on the Battle of Catraith fought between Celtic British or Brythonic kingdoms and the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Bernicia which took place around 598 AD. Gillian’s version of it is divided into one hundred ‘laments’ each section headed by the name of one of the fallen warriors. ‘The King of Britain’s Daughter’ Diana mentioned was an oratorio performed at the 1993 Hay-on- Wye Festival based on the Mabinogion of Brangwyn daughter of Llyr.
Diana then read the most moving lament for Nelson Mandela called ‘Madiba’ from Clarke’s 2017 ‘Zoology’ collection. We were impressed by the poet’s deep compassion and humanity. She also writes elegies in it for Hedd Wyn and Wilfred Owen.
Diana read ‘Marged’ to us in which the poet having moved to a basic cottage in the hills thinks of Marged
“... sometimes when I lie in bed,
falling asleep in the room I have made in the roof-space
over the old dark parlwr where she died
alone in winter, ill and penniless,
Lighting the lamps”... and the heart-breaking image of the old lady
“where through the mud she called her single cow” The poet in this piece contrasts her relative comfort to the hard, lonely life of Marged and concludes that their circumstances are so different that
“What else do we share, but being women?”
Helen then read ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’. She told us that Clarke thought for a long time before she published this and that it was a real story. The poem starts with a quote from Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’:
‘They flash upon that inward eye
which is the bliss of solitude’
She then continues by describing her arrival at her workplace through an idyllic sunlit, daffodil and tree-strewn pathway to what could be a country house. However, it is a home for the insane. She is reading poetry to the inmates and then she very tenderly describes how:
“A big, mild man is tenderly led
to his chair. He has never spoken.” He rocks gently to the rhythm of the poetry and then suddenly stands. The poet fears what he is about to do and like:
“...the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer’s voice recites ‘The Daffodils’.” She expresses the innate power of verse through this minor miracle in “the big, dumb labouring man” and in the most unlikely of places.
Her second choice was ‘Especially When the West Wind’ from ‘Zoology’.
Marie chose ‘A Difficult Birth’ about an old ewe who “...til this year had given the ram the slip” The poet had thought her to be barren but on Good Friday she was struggling to give birth. Clarke describes, viscerally her own struggle to help bring out the sheep’s first born until:
“I feel a creak in the limbs and pull till he comes
in a syrupy fluid.” Then a second, a twin lamb, comes out with no trouble. She and her husband find peace:
“at a cradling that might have been a death.”
Her second choice was ‘Letters from Bosnia’ where Gillian Clarke describes beautifully a classroom in VItes where the children paint pictures and write letters to their pen-pals in Llanidloes. The overwhelming sadness she finishes the poem with is deeply felt by the poet and the reader:
“In the photograph, yesterday’s Misha is smiling.
A class group grinning, pulling faces.
They wave, thumbs up to the future.
Behind them, in the rendered wall of the school,
are the bullet holes.”
Geoff’s first poem was ‘Cold Knap Lake’ where the poet’s mother saved a young girl after a crowd hed dragged her from a lake. She “gave a stranger’s child her breath.” Clarke’s father took the girl home “to a poor house” where he “watched her thrashed for almost drowning.”
He then read a moving poem about the mining disaster in June the 28th 1960 which was called the ‘Six Bells Disaster’. Her ‘Six Bells’ poem is personalised which makes it all the more effective. Her subject is a woman “hanging out the wash” of “her weding sheets, his shirts” The poet describes the moment when there is a “sudden hush” when everyone in the town ceased what they were doing to listen. She describes the underground explosion and:
“...As they died,
perhaps a silence, before the sirens cried,
before the people gathered in the street,
before she’s finished hanging out her sheets.”
Diana chose ‘On the Train’ next. In 1999 the Paddington Train Crash took place. Apparently Clarke was travelling from Manchester to Wales when she heard the news of the crash. Normally she would have been travelling from Paddington herself. She turns ordinary, everyday images into poetry “Hot tea trembles in its plastic cup” and “The Vodaphone you are calling
may have been switched off.” The latter poignantly speaking to some unknown victim as “Please call later” echoes
“..in the rubble,
and in the rubble of suburban kitchens
the wolves howl into silent telephones.”
Diana continued with ‘A Sonnet for Nye’ about the great Welsh politician Aneurin Bevan. She wrote it to commemorate the sixtieth birthday of the NHS. It is a fine poem which starts “London was used to trouble from the Valleys...” and describes him as:
“A fierce man with a silver tongue,
He hammered stammered words in the hallowed air
Of the House, an Olympian among them,
Stuttering his preposterous social dream
Translated from ‘a little local scheme’.”
Helen brought her third piece ‘Hydrangeas’ to us in which Clarke describes someone, possibly her lover, bringing in a trug-full of sodden hydrangeas from the “sulk of a wet summer” They are now:
“a weight of wet silk
in my arms like her blue dress” referring to her mother. She then compares their falling petals to “night-inks shaken from their hair” and is reminded of her childhood when her mother leaned to kiss her goodnight and the shadow of her red hair cut out the light and the childlike knowledge that downstairs was more bright and appealing like, she says: “...a lost bush of hydrangeas.” She then returns to the person who found these “lovely, silky, dangerous,
their lapis lazulis, their indigoes
tide-marked and freckled with the rose of death.” A sudden change here when we recognise the signs of the flower dying in the blue shades turning to pink, losing colour though still beautiful and we are brought back to the elderly mother and “I touch my mother’s skin.” and she appeals to the donor “Touch mine.”
Diana finished her choices with ‘Catrin’ about the relationship between mother and daughter. The poem starts with
“Fierce confrontation.” Both parent and child bound to one another by the:
“...tight
Red rope of love” but both wishing to be free: “...We want, we shouted,
To be two, to be ourselves.” We are made aware, of course, even in their conflict of the poet’s deep love for her daughter in phrases like:
“... Still I am fighting
You off, as you stand there
With your straight, strong, long
Brown hair and your rosy,
Defiant glare, bringing up
From the heart’s pool that old rope,
Tightening about my life,
Trailing love and conflict,” As outsiders we realise that this monumental conflict is just about Catrin asking to be able to skate outside for another hour in the dark. The parent’s anxiety about this is seen by the daughter and possibly us as totally unnecessary but... “that old rope.”
Lastly Geoff read ‘Titanic’ in which Clarke writes in a formulaic style rather like a sea-shanty in its repetition. She imagines the carefree opulence of the drowned ship’s ballroom dancers still echoing to ”the drum of the waves
to the drum of the waves.”
After a feast of poetic beauty we were then indulged in tea, coffee, chocolate cake with fresh cream and French sponge cakes by our host Diana. Thank you so very much for your hospitality Diana.
gw