Book description
The 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.
'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
Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor,
broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the
Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has taught creative writing in
primary and secondary schools and at university level. She is a former
president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she
co-founded in 1990. Since 1994 she has been a tutor in Creative Writing
at the University of Glamorgan. Clarke was the inaugural Capital Poet
for Cardiff 2005-6. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students
throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe
and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten
languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and now lives with her
architect husband on a smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they
raise a small flock of sheep, and care for the land according to organic
and conservation practice. In 2008 Gillian Clarke was appointed National
Poet of Wales.
