On the palm of a ledge outside the publisher's window
in the Corn Exchange is a clutch of broken eggs,
fledglings blown away twig-limbed and goggle-eyed.
I imagine a poem of love from the publisher's desk
afloat like a bright balloon against the wire.


from 'The City: The Bomb'

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, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences.

There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.

'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.'
Times Literary Supplement