"Zoology" is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose "heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn", holding us "in the planet of its stare". Within th...

In "Ice" Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem "Polar" is the poet's point de repere, evo...

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...

"At the Source" reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a fami...

The title sequence of "Making the Beds for the Dead" charts the journey of a virus in "the plague year". Come from outer space, it travels – on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard – into the very heart of our lives. The poet incl...

The poems in Gillian Clarke's "Five Fields" break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall,...

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 h...

"The King of Britain's" Daughter was specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the "Mabinogion" of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest,...