Zoology

by Gillian Clarke

Overview

Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry

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 this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. 'Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, 'where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb 'birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby 'in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. 'Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that 'flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: 'a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784102173
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	11/27/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	120
Sales rank:	474,119
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff in 1937 and now lives in Ceredigion. A poet, play­wright and tutor on the M.Phil in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan, she is also president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. She was the inaugural Capital Poet for Cardiff 2005-6. In 2008 she was appointed National Poet of Wales, and in 2010 received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

MISSING

THE PRESENCE

A small wind winds through rush and sedge,
Something powers the morning, stops the air,
in another place, but a pulsing presence red-brown beneath the trees, a sense that such a living thing once seen in that sunlit space will never be gone,

its breath a mist on the air between field and lawn. There. Not there.

GHOSTS

A cindering sound of rain comes in from the sea over someone's fields and someone else's farms,
and everyone ever here is here again, now:
your father, his miner's hands gnarled as the oak we planted in his name; its leaves are falling gold through the gap in the hedge-bank where something spindles the long lean of its limbs, there,
my Ga whose hands spun lace from Pembrokeshire tides;
They walk towards me over the fields,
EXHUMING YOUR FATHER

Somewhere in a graveyard in broken Greece,
lifts the beloved, once father, once man,
the loosening, letting go. His hands curl on pins and needles, pearls.

CONTRE-JOUR

From where he stands inside the cave,
a boat beached on pebbled silver,
So often we rowed over the bay, slow slap of the swell, lift and dip of the prow,
to hear our voices, smaller, smaller, as if swallowed by the silence of the cliff.

LEARNING TO SWIM

He taught me to swim, his palm a saucer.
• * *

I swim far out across the bay.
I'm cold as sand. In the cave's throat a breath of samphire, the sunken wreck in which I'm trapped in dreams where, in a fishtail gleam she leans to kiss me as she goes dressed in her beauty to a Christmas dance.

The tide lifts and lets go. Nothing breaks the surface of darkness or sea where we beached the boat so long ago,
PATAGONIA

The year he didn't die,
From his ocean-lit cabin, rocked by the sleepless motion of waters,
of a whale breaking the surface where the nib turned, his lines of longhand rolling across fine pages, regular as the sea's unfolding story.

Where are they now, those letters like poetry of the sea?
Left, his voice on tape, found in his office after the funeral, those interviews from Patagonia in a strange Welsh,
After sixty years I hear it better in my head: 'Hwyl fawr,' he says to me,
WAVES

When long ago my father cast his spell with wires and microphones, he told me he could send sound on waves the speed of light to touch the ionosphere and fall home to the wireless on our windowsill.

Sometimes, radio on, half listening, struck still by a line of verse, a voice, a chord, a cadence,
and I still see words on the radio as birds or fish homing to settle in the hush of long waves on a beach in Pembrokeshire,
PAMPAS GRASS

I'm five, and looking after my father.
At the door's a tall man, his pretty wife.
There is no undercurrent I can't hear,
By the gate's a plant I name for the place whose word on the signpost I can't say.
MISSING

I remember Sundays,
she, hot in the kitchen queen of the hour, the day,
he an absence, underground,
his hands under running water,
THE POET

Beth yw gweithio ond gwnaed cân o'r coed a'r gwenith?

(What is work but making a song from the wood and the wheat?)

WALDO WILLIAMS

We pause on the bend of the stony track to look at the sea. He lifts me onto the gate, in his pocket an apple for the milk-horse. Its breath is a field.
Over horizons of gate, field, sea,
I dream we're flying – when my father turns, greeting a man on the track, not Brân,
CHAPTER 2

BEHIND GLASS

SILENT

these creatures,
the generations in their glass houses,
In the stone, a bird skeleton spread in a scrabble of earth before flight,
The dead here live forever in their stillness.
Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?

ARCHAEOPTERYX

The first bird in the world stilled in stony silence in its case.
ICHTHYOSAUR

Jurassic travellers trailing a wake of ammonites,
Behind glass she dies giving birth.
and the frozen baby turning its head to the world at the last moment as all babies do, choked as it learned to live.

like a lamb at the field-edge born the wrong way up or strangled at birth by the mothering cord.

As he ducked under her lintel,
THE COMPANY OF BONES

Orangutan, Chimpanzee, Gorilla, Man have kept me company for days here in the silence,
On the table, touchable, molar of mammoth, mandible of wolf, humerus of bear, skull of reindeer,
and elk, short antler-beams before palmation, high nasal bones, long snout to forage in its arboreal home.

Yet again and again I return to this little dancer,
twenty-six joints in the engineered curve of its tail,
my own heart working the blood through my wrist,
DODO

What is left of this bird but a word for loss and a thousand bones in the mire of Mare aux Songes?
prodigious pigeon, she flew across warm seas under the Southern Cross in the world's emptiness lonely ages ago, fed on fruits of paradise,

forgot how to fly, laid her single egg on a nest of sticks, warmed it to hatch under her breast.
Her cry's lost on the wind; feathers, flesh rot in the swamp of dreams. What might have been just bones found in the mud by human feet –

skull, scapula, vertebrae, toes – each a hieroglyph of the alphabet by which we read the myth.

MARSH FRITILLARIES

Eurodryas aurinia

A drawer of frozen butterflies,
THE SNOWDON RAINBOW BEETLE

Chrysolina cerealis

Trapped like the Snowdon lily when ice lost its grip as loosening glaciers began to slip,
CHAPTER 3

HAFOD Y LLAN

MOUNTAIN

This place has secrets,
Deep as the Ordovician, old workings,
MINE

By torchlight a stream hangs three hundred feet in glassy stillness.
where the miner waded to the knees in ice,
where rungs crook rusted fingers over the drop,
where the falling stone of his cry is echoing still.

RIVER

The current does a double-turn under the bridge, about the boulder,
Ages of ice and water made this place,
Blue with copper, Craflwyn's waters smoothed boulders for gateposts, walls,
Weather, miner, shepherd, farmer made this place,
BARRACKS

The moan of wind in these stones is the lonely monotone of men, half dreaming, half awake under the weight of longing for a wife in their aching arms;

for pain to lift from their bones;
FLOWERS OF THE MOUNTAIN

In Arctic scree, sandstone, granite, quartzite:
crevice communities of ferns, mosses,
for sheep, under the shadow of peregrine,
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "Zoology"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Gillian Clarke.
Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Title Page,
I · MISSING,
II · BEHIND GLASS,
III · HAFOD Y LLAN,
IV · ONE YEAR,
V,
VI · ELEGIES,
Notes,
Acknowledgements,
Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press,
Copyright,