Ice

Reviews / Votes

'In Ice Gillian Clarke explores memory and identity through a series of winter landscapes.'

Adam Newey, The Guardian, 1st December 2012 As the title suggests, water dominates Gillian Clarke's A Recipe for Water, a substantial collection of close on eighty poems - rich with her perennial themes of language, history and landscape. Her specific focus on water allows her to examine the city in the context of the world's oceans and waterways while poems on her trip to Mumbai shows water as vital to survival and means of temporary respite from poverty's degradation. Throughout this collection the overriding concern is the evolution of the world and language, and although her poetry has always reflected Welsh concerns, subsequent to her being made National poet of Wales in 2008 the importance of the Welsh language has been further foregrounded. Clarke, in this collection has certainly come into her own as the public poet of Wales.

She opens with a series of poems on her growing awareness of language as she grows up. 'First Words' does this with delightful dexterity, weaving a tapestry of language references set against the urban and rural landscape, with every sound contributing to her growing sense of words.

The sea turns its pages, speaking in tongues.

The stories are you and you are the story.

And before you know it you'll know what comes

from air and breath and off the page is all

you'll want, like the sea's jewels in your hand,

and the soft mutations of seas washing on sand.

This phrase 'air and breath and off the page' powerfully encapsulates poetry as the only thing that is vital to her. She continues the language/land motifs in a number of the poems in the early part of the book such as: 'Now syllables flock like a whirr of redwings / over the field on my mind' ('A Pocket Dictionary'). Poem after poem deals with memories of naming and in 'Not' this includes how the Welsh language placed her mother as an outsider growing up, when the voice of the landlord's man made her feel alienated: 'his word 'Welsh' snapped, cutting, curt, / a word that called her stranger'.

And always one to voice her concerns about the world's ills whether it be war, terrorism or Foot and Mouth, we see continuing evidence of her belief in poetry as a powerful means of voicing resistance as she tells us in 'The Ledbury Muse': 'To cry out against terror is what poetry's for, / to admit our one white feather, our fatal, human flaw'.

Clarke is interested in where history begins and ends and in the sequence 'A Recipe for Water' she argues for water as the element that must have triggered the first utterance:

That drop on the tongue

was the first word in the world

head back, eyes closed, mouth open

to drink the rain

wysg, uisc, dwr, hudra, aqua, eau, wasser.

Water, in the course of the collection is seen to travel an immense journey providing a cosmic sense of water's grand movements via oceans and rivers about the globe. In 'The Reader's Digest Atlas of the World', for example, she describes the pleasure she gains from examining the shifting currents of the world's oceans. She gives the impression that she is observing the world with a heightened geographical sense of wholeness. One notes this in particular in 'The Rising Tide' where the city is described as an archaeological site where one can peel back the layers to uncovers its dead:

And the ordinary dead,

with their quiet histories,

will be the first to know,

six feet under in their cemeteries,

seepage shifting their bones

as the water-table rises.

When the Severn shoulders in

against outpouring Taff, Ely and Rhymney,

the streets will become a delta,

terraces afloat, reflective.

And with Clarke one always feels that it is this 'ordinary' living and dead with which she is most concerned. This comes through, powerfully in her two poems on Oradour-Sur-Glane the village that has been kept as a permanent memorial to the war and where the SS on 10th June 1944 massacred an entire village:

Don't think of the soldiers who raided the cellars,

fed well, drank their good wine,

pleasured themselves before sleep

dreaming of wives and lovers,

woke to a peerless summer morning,

crossed themselves, blessed

their sons, their daughters

and set off for the slaughter.

Shocking as the images are in this poem it is the following linked poem on one ordinary life that leaves a permanent haunting impression well after on has closed the book. Here we have Clarke's masterly ability to draw on concrete detail for often devastating effect - this is a superb poem which deserves citing in full:

'Singer'

Something about its silence,

a black machine, gold finery lowered

and locked for good under the lid,

the stilled treadle, little drawers of silks,

spare needles rusting in their paper cases,

suggests a small foot rocking,

a delicate ankle bone in grey lisle

lifting and falling to an old heartbeat,

silk slipping under her hand

like the waters of the Glane beneath the bridge,

treadle and thread and woman singing

in another language sixty years ago

one warm June afternoon in Oradour,

before the sun fired the west windows of the church,

before the last tram from Limoges.

Clarke has always been able to write well without sentimentality on women's ordinary domestic chores but here she takes it to a new level. There is real artistry in the way Clarke captures the woman's 'delicate ankle bone in grey lisle / lifting and falling to an old heartbeat'; it's as if she is painting her poem with a Vermeer-like precision. From here the juxtaposition of the woman's guiding of the silk against the river's movement beneath the bridge seems to imply that the massacre by the SS actually stopped nature. This is the kind of poem that causes you to halt.

All in all, this is a collection that doesn't falter, which is no mean feat given its length, added to which the poems just seem to get even stronger as the collection comes to a close - with a sudden fluttering of sharp standalone lyrics on family subjects that leave us feeling that she has in fact saved the best wine till last in a collection where the wine was already really good anyway. 'This collection is a kind of seasonal Shepherd's Calendar.'

January to mid-March 1947: the Big Freeze.Blizzards engulf a bankrupt post-war Britain.Schoolgirl Gillian Clarke awakens in a Pembrokeshire countryside where no birds sing.Drifts block roads and railways.One quarter of Britain's sheep are about to die. Gillian gazes through panes imprinted with ice-ferns.Coal can't get to power stations: the nation's lights go out.On Gillian's hearth, the polar bear rug rears up thrillingly in its original Arctic magnificence.Food shortage looms.Gillian shivers as she hears of a child's frozen corpse on the road.In mid-March come thaw, flood, gales.

December 2009-10: this so-called 'Big Freeze' is less apocalyptic than hypnotic.There's transport disruption, school closure, power failure .Wales' national poet Gillian Clarke, awakens in her Ceredigion home to find that something strange has happened to time.It is suspended; it runs back.She is again the little girl who observed the milk that 'stood stunned' on doorsteps in 1947; she's 'dreamimg on the white bear's shoulder' in a rueful ecstasy of recidivism - the rug rearing up to be bear again, before the bullet felled it.As long as the snow lasts, she's haunted.



Ice is partly partoral elegy, partly georgic.Clarke farms in Ceredigion and we see in these poems her 'carry hay/ to twelve ewes waiting hungry at the gates'.After the thaw, she and her partner lure a ewe indoors, dangling her newborn lambs ahead, 'their hearts in our hands'.The art of husbandry is a work forever in progress like the labour of the compassionate imagination.

In the beautiful 'White Nights', Clarke recalls that her house was once Magred's - Marged Blaen Cwrt, who lived and died there a century ago, eking existence in conditions of extremity: 'hay-dust, cold, the sickness in her lungs, the knell/ of the cow lowing to be milked, kicking its stall'.Clarke has always had a sensitive feel for line-placement and assonantal rhyme: 'knell' and 'stall', linked by half-rhyme lament for both woman and creature.The cow that sustains Marged relies on her for life.



Ice mourns the ruined farmsteads in the depopulated Ceredigion countryside, 'Gone,/ rooms of daughters, a crogloft of five sons,/ ovens of baking bread,cauldrons of cawl'.Poems movingly commemorate creaturely life - grebes, shearwaters, an old dog, a male swan whose mate has died in the freeze.

This collection is a kind of seasonal Shepherd's Calendar, tending as calendars must, toward a new 'Year's Midnight':'and the ice melts/ and the seas rise'.Spenser wrote in his November eclogue, 'All Musick sleeps, where Death doth lead the Daunce'.Pastoral elegy immemorially laments, not only waste and destruction in moral nature, but also the premature sacrifice of human voice and poetry.In 1947, news of the ice-girl's end aroused in the prescient young Gillian a sense of 'her china ink-well emptied of its words,/the groove for her pen like a shallow grave'. Gillian Clarke (Touchstone Lyricist) freezes with Ice (Carcanet, RPP GBP9.95), not to be read in an underheated house. Beautifully crafted, it moves from a Welsh winter right through the year back to snow again, taking in legends both ancient and contemporary.