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    A Recipe for Water
    A Recipe for Water
    A Recipe for Water
    Ebook87 pages37 minutes

    A Recipe for Water

    By Gillian Clarke

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    About this ebook

    Using water as a contemplative device, this anthology examines themes of war, womanhood, time, and the environment. Individual poems focus on a range of topics—from the seemingly unremarkable contents of a bottle of spring water to the more global issue of rising ocean levels. Rain, drought, flood, thirst, rivers, and oceans inspire this thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between water and language.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherIndependent Publishers Group
    Release dateApr 1, 2012
    ISBN9781847778130
    A Recipe for Water
    Author

    Gillian Clarke

    Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008-16, and co-edited The Map and the Clock: A Laureate’s Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland (Faber, 2016) with Carol Ann Duffy. Her numerous books of poetry include Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998), Making the Beds for the Dead (2004) and Ice (2012) and Zoology (2017), all from Carcanet, and Selected Poems (2016) from Picador. She received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, in 2012, the first woman to receive the latter.

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      Book preview

      A Recipe for Water - Gillian Clarke

      GILLIAN CLARKE

      A Recipe for Water

      For David

      Acknowledgements

      Acknowledgements are due to the following publications where some of these poems, versions or translations of them, first appeared: Planet; The New Welsh Review; Orbis; Touchstone; Taliesin; A470; Magma; Journal of the Academy of Social Studies (June 2008); Welsh and Proud Of It (Pont Books 2007); Poems of Love and Longing (Pont Books 2008); Branch Lines: Edward Thomas and Contemporary Poetry (ed. Guy Cuthbertson and Lucy Newlyn, Enitharmon 2007). ‘‘Sgwarnog’ and ‘Shepherd’ first appeared in At the Source (Carcanet 2008).

      I am grateful to the following for commissioning some of these poems: Ledbury Festival 2005; Bath Festival of Literature, 2008; Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Caerdydd 2008; Green Bay Television; The Verb, BBC Radio 3; Woman’s Hour, BBC Radio 4; the Royal Society of Architects in Wales; Theatr Arad Goch; the Bevan Foundation; St Fagans Folk Museum; the Royal Commission for Ancient Monuments; Galeri, Caernarfon. Thanks are due to Cardiff City Council and the Academi for my year as Capital Poet in 2005, which prompted the City poems; the Sociology Department of Cardiff University for commissioning poems for the Futures Conference, 2005; Poetry Live and the British Council for the week spent in Mumbai, 2007; the Academi and the Welsh Assembly Government for opportunities and commissions arising from the post of National Poet for Wales.

      Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Acknowledgements

      First Words

      A Pocket Dictionary

      Glas y Dorlan

      Not

      Otter

      The Fox and the Girl

      ‘Sgwarnog

      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 Tâf

      Architect

      Coins

      Llandâf Cathedral

      Sleepless

      Subway

      The Rising Tide

      Welsh

      Stadium

      Wing

      Number 8

      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

      Dawn

      Shepherd

      About the Author

      Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press

      Copyright

      First Words

      The alphabet of a house – air,

      breath, the creak of the stair.

      Downstairs the grown-ups’ hullabaloo,

      or their hush as you fall asleep.

      You’re learning the language: the steel slab

      of a syllable dropped at the docks; the two-beat word

      of the Breaksea lightship; the golden sentence

      of a train crossing the viaduct.

      Later, at Fforest, all the words are new.

      You are your grandmother’s Cariad, not Darling.

      Tide and current are llanw, lli.

      The waves repeat their ll-ll-ll on sand.

      Over the sea the starlings come in paragraphs.

      She tells you a tale of a girl and a bird,

      reading it off the tide in lines of

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