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    Zoology
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    Zoology
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    Zoology
    Ebook109 pages38 minutes

    Zoology

    By Gillian Clarke

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose "heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn", holding us "in the planet of its stare". Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. "Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?" In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, "where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals". Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb "birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight" to the ewe bearing her baby "in the funeral boat of her body". The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. "Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is." Then our hare, that 'flight of sinew and gold", is spotted one last time: "a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone".
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateNov 27, 2017
    ISBN9781784102173
    Unavailable
    Zoology
    Author

    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.

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