Elizabeth Burns, Orbis magazine, Autumn 2004

At the beginning is a poem about a Vermeer painting, where a woman peels an apple and from it learns about the universe: 'The apple turns / under fixed stars, / Her knife cuts into the Pole...' This image of the held, particular object linked with something far larger seems an apt one for the actual book, because although it begins in familiar Clarke territory, the Welsh landscape, with its 'drum and dither of wild bees', and, after haymaking, 'every last grass and fallen flower of the field / by nightfall cooling under the moon', it widens to encompass the violent, damaged world of the 21st century.

It opens with poems about the past, with lovely elegies for RS Thomas and for Ted Hughes, and a sequence on the ancient, geological basis of the landscape, where 'Slate', for example, is 'bruised purple by so much time, / a history book, its pages open / for the text of lichens and weather.' But gradually the poems become more unsettling. Land is flooded, and there's a smashed nest of adders, a car crash, a train crash, a remembered howl of grief like 'a rucksack of sorrow / on your shoulder'...then we're plunged into the title sequence on Foot and Mouth, into September 11th and the war in Iraq.

...In the penultimate poem, 'Aftermath', Clarke writes of 'dust settling on a shaken world' and of 'the peeled skull / of a frog, like the husk of a planet', and it's as if by the end of the book, the poet herself, raw and 'peeled' is readjusting to 'this shaken world'. But her voice emerges through it as a strongly humane one, bardic and prophetic, writing as witness to destruction and enduring beauty.