Ice

By Gillian Clarke

In Ice Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010. In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination. The poem 'Polar' is the poet's point de repère, evoking a polar-bear rug she had as a child and here resurrects in a spirit of personal and ecological longing that becomes a creative act. She lives with the planet, its seasons and creatures, in a joyful, anxious communion. The book also includes the asked for' and commissioned poems, and the Guardian spreads Clarke has written during her time as National Poet of Wales (2008-2013). She follows in the rich millennium-old Welsh tradition of occasional writing going back to the first-known named British poets Aneirin and Taliesin in the sixth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Release date: Oct 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9781847776884

Gillian Clarke

Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008-16, and co-edited The Map and the Clock: A Laureate’s Choice of the Poetry of Britain and Ireland (Faber, 2016) with Carol Ann Duffy. Her numerous books of poetry include Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998), Making the Beds for the Dead (2004) and Ice (2012) and Zoology (2017), all from Carcanet, and Selected Poems (2016) from Picador. She received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry, and the Wilfred Owen Poetry Award, in 2012, the first woman to receive the latter.

Reviews for Ice

[rosielee_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

As ever with Clarke the focus is on the natural world - and in this collection, warnings about what it can do to us - there's an ominous quality to many of the poems, as well as a strong sense of the past, alive in the present through our collective memory. The lyrical descriptions of winter landscapes are superlative (it was good to read this collection in conjunction with Adam Gopnik's series of essays on Winter, they complemented each other perfectly) - 'Land lay spellbound. World was an ice garden/beyond fern-frozen glass'. Certain lines stop you in your tracks - 'Snow's sensational. It tastes/of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold'. 'Sensational' - yes, of course - brilliant! She is also very good at incorporating the material world into the natural one in unexpected ways, as when 'In the square, cars idle to their stalls, as cattle/remembering their place in the affair./Headlamps bloom and die...' The final, beautiful, poem gives hope: 'The earth speaks in parables./ The burning bush. the rainbow./Promises. Promises.' A cherishable collection.