Tim Liardet, North magazine, issue 36, Summer 2005

Gillian Clarke's Making the Beds for the Dead continues with more of what we expect from her: the clarity of her narrative drive, the acute observation of the natural world. 'A Woman Sleeping at a Table', 'The Piano' and 'Woman Washing her Hair', however, strive way beyond this, and possibly the best poem in the book is 'Stranger on a Train', a chilling update on Hardy's 'Faint Heart in a Railway Carriage', brilliantly focusing a post-millenial sense of menace and shifted expectation: 'A seaman, maybe. A soldier. Nothing odd, / but his glittering straightahead stare. / He didn't once look at the perfect morning.' But the book takes off when we arrive at the title sequence which charts the details of the Foot and Mouth crisis on 2001. To all the poems she has written over the years which draw upon a kind of post-Hughesian epic appreciation of nature must be added this new unadorned, plain-speaking evocation of men and animals locked together in endurance:

First the animals lost their voices,
then the people.
We couldn't speak

We couldn't hold each other.
Words drowned in a howl of wind,
in the howl of a man in a hollow barn.

('Silence, February 2001')

The Foot and Mouth poems are poems of witness, the authentications of one who knows how the virus '...travels like loose talk, / on the tongue, on the hoof, / on the air, word of mouth, / faster than breathing.' ('On the Move'). The best of them are outstandingly good, vivid with their own intensifiers and breed a new kind of language for Clarke which is infused with muted anger, as in 'Plague', part of the title sequence: 'A pedigree Holstein with a fancy name / hangs, grotesque from the JCB hook / against an inferno of flame and smoke.'