Out at the Bright Edge

By Caroline Clark

Out at the Bright Edge is a collection of poetry rooted in North Ceredigion. The poems in this collection describe and respond to the landscape and history of the area from the Dyfi to the Teifi. They deal with ideas through a focus on place, capturing memorable moments in specific locations and celebrating an area of outstanding natural beauty and its long history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Y Lolfa
• Release date: Jan 12, 2018
• ISBN: 9781784615178

Book preview

Preface

The land mapped by these lines is not large in area, covering roughly the northern half of Ceredigion, but it is deep in stories and in time. These poems are my response to the places on a particular day or season, but also to the way the past is still present in them.

As with A Norfolk Songline, which originally inspired the idea, most of the poems are on trails – the coastal path and the courses of the Rivers Rheidol and Ystwyth – but here geography and history do not fall so conveniently into order. In this collection I have opted to arrange the poems so that their foci follow a path through time rather than space, and leave readers to track them down on the map if they wish to.

Ultimately the poems are about places that I wanted to write about because they mattered to me, rather than because they gave a guided tour of the area. Some are famous, some anonymous, and both natives and visitors would say there are obvious omissions. They vary in style from free verse to Haiku to ballad as seemed appropriate, but while I would not attempt cynghanedd in English, I use the alliteration basic to both Welsh and Anglo-Saxon traditions – an echoing and layering of sound for this land of layers and echoes.

‘Snow’ and ‘Bridge’ appeared in Countryside Tales. ‘Easter Saturday – Ridgeway Above Llanilar’ won the annual sonnet competition in Cannon’s Mouth. ‘Winter Afternoon under Alltwen’ was published by Leaf. ‘Ynyslas / Drowned Land’ and ‘Friday Evening, Graduation Week’ appeared in The EGO.

Caroline Clark, July 2017

Of Times...

1 Land of the Book

Land of the book:

Pages of folded shale lie opened by the fault’s river,

Layers curled and crushed, their corners turned to remember

Where slow settlement became whirlpool or when,

Deep under a lost mountain’s press,

Rock flowed, printed with quartz,

Chased with silver, lined with lead.

Crib of the book:

Cluster of huts under a cross of stone

In the valley, a hive of hands tracing the Word,

God spelled on pages of painted sheepskin,

Capitals woven like withies or jewelled wire,

Wealth and peace in the clas of St Padarn.

Mark of the book

Stamped on our hills’ silver

Served and saved England’s king for a while.

Here his