On the first day of January I open a new journal and mark the cleanpage with a date, location, a first sentence… The first words print thefield of snow. I relish the moment, the pen, the white page.

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 family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets.

Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet’s imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer’s year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.

'Gillian Clarke’s outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths.' Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian
 
'Gillian Clarke’s [poems] ring with lucidity and power… Clarke’s work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement


Cover drawing copyright Mirlo Cai Cardenas. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover design StephenRaw.com