Description
Book SynopsisThe drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, 'was the first word in the world', and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures - the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths are born where great rivers have their source high in the mountains. A bottle of spring water contains the mineral elements of life; we can read the earth's deep history in arctic ice. We share the rhythms of migrations in the pull of tides and seasons through rivers and estuaries. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.
Trade Review'Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power...her work is personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' - Times Literary Supplement 'Clarke's mellifluous new collection [A Recipe for Water] is her first since her appointment as Wales's national poet in 2008. The drop of water on the tongue, she tells us, 'was the first word in the world', and it's through water that these poems give up their stories: history is written into the Arctic's ice; myths well up from river sources; the currents on the ocean wash culture and heritage onto our shores. Watery collections have poured forth from the pens of poets from Sean O'Brien to Maura Dooley in recent years; anticipation is high for Clarke's contribution to the pool'. - Sarah Crown, the Guardian, 3 January 2009
Table of ContentsContents First Words A Pocket Dictionary Glas y Dorlan Not Otter The Fox and the Girl Sgwarnop 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 Taf Architect Coins Llandaf Cathedral Sleepless Subway The Rising Tide Welsh Stadium Wing Number 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 Shepherd
