Ice

Disgrifiad Cymraeg / Welsh Description

Casgliad o gerddi synhwyrus a ysbrydolwyd gan aeafau oer 2009 a 2010, a roddod gip ar hen ffordd o fyw, pan welwyd Natur yn ailgadarnhau ei hun a'r tymhorau'n cael eu hailddiffinio.

Disgrifiad Saesneg / English Description

In Ice Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination.

Dosbarthu

Byddwn yn dosbarthu eitemau sydd mewn stoc o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith, fel arfer drwy Royal Mail Tracked 48. Ar gyfer archebion o flaen llaw, byddwn yn dosbarthu’r eitem o fewn 3 diwrnod gwaith ar ôl ei derbyn gan ein cyflenwr.

Dispatch

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Adolygiad y Cyhoeddwr / Publisher Review

A new collection from Gillian Clarke is always eagerly anticipated and this is a splendid fulfilment of that hope (and an excellent New Year present). The freezing winters of 2009 and 2010 inspire not only fine descriptions of that experience, when she was ‘trapped’ in Cardiff, above a frozen river, then returned to the farm to be snowed in again, but recall other winters, in her childhood and in history. A recollection of a polar bear (skin rug) becomes the living embodiment of wild winter. She has always had that gift of being able to open out her own memory and experience to encompass wide vistas of time and space. The title poem begins with the specific – ice on a bare beech tree –– and becomes a celebration of the moment of creation. In the little six line poem ‘Freeze 2010’, the grief of the mother of a murdered girl becomes Demeter’s grief for Persephone, which was winter itself, and, through her, all mothers weeping for dead children. This collection shows her also in the tradition of the bard, praise-singer and commemorator for her people, rediscovering the grief of Aneirin, celebrating the Senedd building or lamenting the dead of earthquake and mine disaster. There is also a recurring strand concerning her mother’s chosen renunciation of Welsh and so her own loss of the old tongue and the loss of the family house & mill - dying ‘in the arms of sycamore and ash’(‘Taid’). Perhaps because of beginning by focusing on ice and the sight and sounds of the freeze, these poems dig deep into the senses. In ‘Ice Music’ the ’high far hum’ and then ‘morning and evening, a moan of expanding ice / a timpani of plates colliding’ is one example; the marvellous phrase ‘plushy creak’ for the sensation and sound of making snowballs (‘Snow’) is another. ‘Wild Plums’ and ‘Mango’ both evoke how vividly taste can bring back a memory. ‘Bluebells’ does the same for colour while in her celebration of marriage, ‘Er Gwell, Er Gwaeth’, she writes of ‘the language of hands’ and in ‘Bluebells’ of how ‘folds of a satin dance-dress/ fell about me like a drench of water’. Although there are certainly dark moments here – the bleak ‘if only’ of remembered disasters such as in ‘Gleision’ or ‘Six Bells’, the sense of loss in ‘The Dead After The Thaw’ or ‘Swans’ – there is also a huge sense of love and energy. In ‘Home for Christmas’ the restrictions of the freeze on the farm brings back to her the excitement of their early days there, of ‘being young and bold, bravely in love’. In ‘Lambs’ the thaw is also the time of ‘the breaking of (birth) waters’ and in ‘Grebes’ we have an ecstatic celebration of spring and rebirth: ‘the future/ is waking, seed’s clutch of stars/ to quicken in the curve of the dark.’ Her poetry has sometimes plumbed depths of despair and destruction (in ‘Making the Beds for the Dead’ for example) but here, though there is still warning and sorrow, Gillian Clark gives us poetry rich as the ever-renewing world itself.