‘A Difficult Birth, Easter 1998’ describes an old ewe having to be helped to give birth – while the peace negotiations in Northern Ireland conclude. Another poem from her collection Five Fields (1998) is even more reflective of her compassionate politics. This oblique evocation of the 1990s conflicts in former Yugoslavia brings that faraway violence into personal focus. The poet has a bad dream about children, ‘their bones brittle as mouse-ribs, the air/ stammering with gunfire, my neighbour turned/ stranger, wounding my land with stones’. A child cradles a mouse fatally injured by the tractor blade. A striking example of how she often brings these together is her poem ‘The Field-Mouse’, depicting a summer scene on her farm when ‘the air hums with jets./ Down at the end of the meadow,/ far from the radio’s terrible news,/ we cut the hay’. Rooted in her rural home territory of West Wales as her writing is, its other side is an international world view concerned with justice, war and peace. However, her poems are generous with their Welsh words and titles and she ‘sometimes weaves characteristics typical of Welsh-language poetry, such as traditional strict metres, into her work’. Unlike her distinguished contemporary Menna Elfyn and other Welsh-language poets, Clarke has always written in English, which she calls her ‘mother tongue’. Her view of that poetic tradition is also pragmatic. So it was entirely appropriate that she was appointed the National Poet of Wales in 2008, a culmination of many years of dedication to her culture and to the art of poetry itself. It’s an unbroken ancient tradition’, Gillian Clarke has remarked, adding ‘I’m born into a Welsh tradition’. In 2010 she was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards. In 2012 she received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award. The book Ice was shortlisted for the T. In 2008 she published a book of prose, including a journal of the writer's year, entitled At The Source, and was named as Wales' National Poet. Gillian Clarke's most recent poetry collection is A Recipe for Water (2009). She has travelled widely giving poetry readings and lectures, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She is President of Ty Newydd, the Writer's Centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990, and teaches on the M.Phil Writing Course at the University of Glamorgan. The latest three collections have all been Poetry Book Society Recommendations. Gillian Clarke has published several collections of poetry including Letter From a Far Country (1982) Letting in the Rumour (1989) The King of Britain's Daughter (1993) and Five Fields (1998). She has also written for stage, television and radio, several radio plays and poems being broadcast by the BBC. She has written books for children, including The Animal Wall: and other poems (1999), Owain Glyn Dwr 1400-2000 (2000) and One Moonlit Night (1991), the latter being translations from the Welsh of traditional stories by T. Gillian Clarke was born in Cardiff, Wales, and now lives with her family on a smallholding in Ceredigion.
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