Collected Poems

Clarke Gillian

The Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's first full collection of poems, "The Sundial", in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops.

"Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power [...] her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical", the "Times Literary Supplement" said. She combines traditional skills with an original voice and outlook, and with a history which includes the unwritten stories of Welsh women. Her "Selected Poems" has proven one of the most popular volumes of modern Welsh poetry, having gone through seven printings in a dozen years. "Her language has a quality both casual and intense, mundane and visionary", the Listener said of Letter from a "Far Country". "There is no gaudiness in her poetry; instead, the reader is aware of a generosity of spirit which allows the poems' subjects their own unbullied reality".

Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poems. "Collected Poems" includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date.

About the Author

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 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. Gillian Clarke was appointed National Poet of Wales in 2008 until 2016.

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