Belinda Cooke, Poetry Ireland Review, Issue 86

Something Endures

In Making Beds for the Dead, Gillian Clarke begins with an explanation of the nature of creativity, of language in particular, a process in which she draws on associations with friends past and present. The collection then divides into a number of sequences triggered by a Commission for Andrew Slater's anthology, Bioverse: Poems for the National Botanical Garden of Wales, and a further commissioned sequence 'Nine Green Gardens', celebrating the Aberglasne Gardens, Carmarthenshire. Subsequent poems continue to reinforce her trademark rural theme, the regenerative qualities of which are brought sharply to the fore by the shock of contemporary events - the Twin Towers, the devastating effect of Foot and Mouth disease and disastrous flooding. Speaking as one who still, naïvely perhaps, regards the poem as the result of some form of inspiration, I was curious to see how well these commissioned poems would stand up against the rest of the collection.

The opening ten poems group together as works about art and artists for the most part, paying tribute to Ted Hughes, R S Thomas and Anne Stevenson, among others. The marvellous opening poem, 'In the Beginning', provides us with what is typical of her writing, a physical immediacy comparable with Heaney's early work, the concrete detail that provides an eureka-like sensation - Yes, that's exactly what it's like; as when she describes her first bible's 'soft black leather cover / tissue pages edged in gold' and its 'moth-thin pages'. 'Mother Tongue' is deceptively simple, with the description of an egg as a 'warm brown pebble' transforming into an extended metaphor for the birth of a language and the affirmation of nature's continuity with the 'cargo of blood and hunger / where the future believes in itself'. The cleverness of her imagery is that the poem is both the birth of the egg and of language. 'The Poet's Ear', with its repetition of 'Nothing to do / with...', focuses mainly on what the poem isn't, explaining ultimately that it's 'The heart / listening to the line's perfect pitch.' In 'The Fisherman', a poem dedicated to Hughes, we can forgive the rather obvious analogies with 'The Thought-Fox' because of the exactitude of 'the moon is a stone / rolled and tumbled in the river's grief.' Then there is the beautifully pared-down language used to describe the haunting impact of Thomas's death, in 'RS':

And - again with acute observation - in 'The Painter' she praises the skill of the artist Mary Lloyd-Jones:

She dips her brush in sky,
in rain, in story
and comes up with who we are
The brush unloads its cloud in a jar
to take its place with stratocumulus,
a trace of rose in cirrus,
a thunderhead on the mountain
before precipitation.

I approached her commissioned 'The Stone Poems', a sequence which attempts to take us beneath the layers of the landscape, with a certain trepidation. I wasn't particularly taken with the first two, 'Rock' and 'Hay', but these are followed by two striking poems: 'Granite' where the granite is described as the 'Milky Way underfoot', 'so small and heavy it can teach you gravity'; and 'Slate', with its Martian-like description, 'a history book, its pages open / for the text of lichens and weather', its colours 'a pigeons throat / of lapping purples, lilacs, greys', all drawing our attention to the fact that pigeons do not deserve such a bad press. From here, however, the sequence gets decidedly heavy unless you've donned your geological hat, as you garb the dictionary to refresh your memory of the Palaeozoic, Silurian, Devonian, etc. One is slightly relieved to resurface and meet a real miner who'd 'ache / at a sudden breath of bluebells brought / by a May wind in the downdraft'.

My mixed feelings about other sequences weren't fully confirmed until I'd worked my way through to her next group of individual poems. 'The Middleton Poems' are historically interesting, particularly the accounts of Paxton's effort to develop plumbing and exploit the value of ice. There is a certain sensuous pleasure to be gained in the description of one of his banquets, 'Piled in frozen pyramids, / ice-apples, peaches, mulberries, figs, / glowing jellies, junkets, creams...' But in general I found these sequences, - particularly 'Nine Green Gardens' - driven too much by narrative and research, their descriptions less 'sparky'. Ultimately they lacked what for me are the two most important characteristics of a poem, the ability to be memorable and convey emotion, qualities very much in evidence in the work that follows.

These poems begin quietly and seem diverse, but they ultimately hang together with an Audenesque merging of the personal and public. 'Counting Tigers' deals with the individual's experience of night-time insomnia, where the dangerous 'out there' ominously threatens. 'Breathing' has a breathtaking (excuse the pun) simplicity in its account of how we learn to smell, but works by providing another of those eureka moments, since we all experience the smell of 'the coats in the hall' but may never have drawn attention to the fact. The poem rounds off in one of those deceptively simple turns of phrase:

Or the new-born that smell like the sea
and the darkness we came from, that gasp
of the drowned in a breaking wave.

As the collection proceeds, an awareness of the outside world, of Iraq and the threat of terrorism, cannot be ignored, and filters subtly through her thoughts - the motif of 'howling' becoming an expression of an universal grief. 'Front Page' is a poem for our times; a front page photo of distress is a 'rucksack of sorrow, / on your shoulder, on your mind':

Try leaving it on the platform
To be defused like a suspect package.
Try leaving it on the train,
Personal belongings
They remind you to take.
Try to lose it, bin it, burn it,
Indestructible as the polythene
Of flowers in a filthy stairwell.

Other poems - such as 'On the Train', 'Perfecting the Art', 'The Night War Broke' and 'Tomatoes' - are all memorable in the way they interweave the personal life with the threats that all societies have now to endure. The final title sequence, which covers the Foot and Mouth year of 2001, is in places harrowing to read, since it is still fresh in the mind, though it is not clear how such a sequence will stand up over time.

By the time I came to the end of this collection I was left with two conflicting feelings: initially yes, here is much of the kind of poetry that sets Gillian Clarke apart as a poet, but less (the omission of some of the commissioned poems) might have been more; on the other hand, once I had made it through a hedge backwards, leaving me despondent that nature will never manage to cure all our contemporary ills. Yet just when one is beginning to think this, she manages to pull something out of the bag; one is given a crumb not of hope exactly, more a sense that something endures, as captured in the concluding poem:

FLOOD

When all's said
and done
if civilisation drowns
the last colour to go
will be gold
the light on a glass,
the prow of a gondola,
the name on a rosewood piano
as silence engulfs it,

and first to return
to a waterlogged world,
the rivers slipping out to sea,
the cities steaming,
will be gold,
one dip from Bellini's brush,
feathers of angels,
Cinquecento nativities,
And all that follows.