Book review: New Perspectives on Gillian Clarke: Community, Cosmology, Climate and Conflict by Linden Peach

Desmond Clifford

I was an early student of what is now tiresomely called the “English Literature of Wales” or some similar variation. When I registered for the university course it went under the title “Anglo-Welsh Literature” which was even more unsatisfactory.

I am persisting with a one-man campaign to call it simply “Welsh Literature”, which is what it is, and let the context show what language it’s in. What’s wrong with that?  The Manic Street Preachers don’t have to go round calling themselves a “Welsh Band Singing in English” – they’re just A Welsh Band.

Why all the handwringing when it comes to literature?

Anyway, the subject was in its infancy as an academic discipline when I chose the course as an alternative to Chaucer and the delights of Middle English.

It wasn’t popular with my fellow students. Three or four of us would sit round a table with Ned Thomas trying to make sense of David Jones’s “In Parenthesis”.  Honestly, it was harder than The Wife of Bath’s Tale. Ned seemed to know what was going on but I’m not sure the rest of us did.

At that time, the early 1980s, the texts available were a literary Manosphere:  Thomas two ways (RS and Dylan), Ormond, Tripp, Webb, Humphreys etc.

Gillian Clarke was the first woman, at least on my radar, who began to break through. Her subject matter was notably different from the men.

Whereas RS Thomas, who was a sort of colossus bestriding the whole field, wrote about impersonal themes such as God, Wales, existentialism, Clarke wrote about her family, home, her community. She brought poetry back to home and hearth.

Now in her sixth decade of publishing, this critical volume is overdue and welcome. It’s interesting to learn about the different phases of her life and be invited to reflect on her work in that light.

It comes as no surprise to learn that she has kept journals, to which the author has access, since the age of 15 and that these first reflections often mutated into poetry.

Her work first appeared in published form in Poetry Wales in the 1970s, at that time edited by Meic Stevens. I still have a copy of her first volume, The Sundial, published in 1978.

I used to write the date of purchase below my name on the fly leaf, 19.11.82. The cover price was £1.

The first words of the first poem, The Sundial, open with:

Owain was ill today. In the night

He was delirious, shouting of lions

In the sleeping heat.

Immediately, we are located in her life, in her house, with her family. By today we’re more familiar with the idea of poetry rooted in real life but it felt fresh and quite radical half a century ago.

Welsh roots

Clarke’s roots in Wales are wide and deep. She was born in Cardiff and spent her early life in Penarth but through her parents had connections in west Wales and Denbighshire in the north.

She attended Cardiff University and was an early teacher in the burgeoning field of creative writing.

In the 1990s I dropped in a few times on Meic Stevens, then Literature Director at the Arts Council, and he spoke very highly of Clarke’s contributions as a teacher and promoter of writing.

Both of Clarke’s parents were Welsh speaking but chose not to pass the language on to her. This created a relationship of loss and absence with the language, but a relationship all the same.

Peach quotes from a Clarke essay, Voice of the Tribe, “Our placenames and our English speech are haunted by Welsh.”

Clarke has studied Welsh consistently through her life and has moved, geographically as well as culturally, into closer alignment with it. In the mid 1980s she relocated to rural Ceredigion and now identifies as a “developing Welsh speaker”.

This movement reached a concrete form in her 2021 translation of The Gododdin: Lament for the Fallen.

She describes it as “A Version by Gillian Clarke”.  It is not therefore a strict translation but an interpretation of the text. It is an immensely readable version of the foundation text of Welsh literature dating back to the sixth century (and before the Welsh saw themselves as Welsh; they were Celtic tribes living across the British island).

Tributes

The Gododdin is essentially a series of tributes to the men who were preparing to face battle at what we now call Catterick, then Catraeth. Today they’d be photographed, edged in black, with dates and a short biographical note.

What we have in poetic form from the sixth century is their names, their character, their individuality. It is the most remarkable text and bridges time.

This interpretation helps reduce the distance between the two languages and roots English language Welsh writing unapologetically as part of the continuity of Welsh literature.

There is an interesting book to be written by someone on the ways in which political devolution has changed Wales’ literary sensibility.

The naked people walking under an acid rain, popularised by historian Gwyn A Williams in the 1980s, doesn’t feel like the right language for post-devolution Wales.

RS Thomas’s Wales of dead carcasses rotting on the beach doesn’t seem quite right today either, even where there are still grounds for pessimism.

It’s an interesting field. Clarke’s work straddles both eras, roughly half and half. She was the National Poet of Wales (2008-16), a mission created by devolution.

Interplay

The interplay between her personal experience and the national experience has been an increasing feature of the second phase of her poetry.

This book is a mixed bag. Linden Peach is enthusiastic about Clarke’s work, which is a good starting point.

A reader is going to need a fairly sustained academic interest to be grabbed by chapters like “Cosmology in a Planetary Age” and “Sound, Water, Blackness and the Anthropocene”.

This is an academic book and most likely to be of interest to scholars, although the introductory chapters offer a digestible overview for the more general reader.

The final chapter, War and Peace (Part Two) provides a decently accessible evaluation of Clarke’s adaptation of The Gododdin.

New Perspectives on Gillian Clarke is published by University of Wales Press and can be purchased here and at all good bookshops