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A Recipe for Water, Gillian Clarke, Carcanet, 2009. £9.95, ISBN 978-1-8575498-8-1

“This book, with about half the
poems facing outwards to
public themes, resonates with
the poet’s need to reconcile
public and private.”

Clarke’s seventh collection from Carcanet is fascinating and often poignant. It anticipates challenges that Carol Ann Duffy now also faces. Clarke became National Poet of Wales in 2008, following her year as capital Poet in 2005 and numerous commissions. This has meant more pressure to address public issues and to celebrate aspects of national life, including her own ‘Welshness’ – always a sensitive point when Welsh is not the language the poet writes in.

Clarke’s most iconic poems to date offer an irradiated privacy: the thoughts and doings of the poet on her farm, life close to nature working with animals, writing about herself, parents, children, friends, losses, sadness and pleasure. This book, with about half the poems facing outwards to public themes, resonates with the poet’s need to reconcile public and private. The strategies Clarke uses to this end are deeply interesting. As well as offering a wide range of work to enjoy, A Recipe for Water has much to tell about a woman poet meeting a specific requirement to be a public voice. How does she interpret the ‘general voice’/‘voice of the people’ and try to make it her own?

She tries many different ways. There are references to happenings and events which stir communal feeling and equally affect the poet: the Aberfan disaster (“a down-hurtling flow of spoil / taking a primary school”, Glacier), the piping of Welsh water to England (“Weeks of journeys into frozen England ... a woman’s hands ... fill a bowl with what I know / is my own sweet mountain water / brought all the way by gravity”, part 5 of the long poem, A Recipe for Water). The community selfconsciousness which is part of Welsh life also seems to spin-off into her moving poems here about Oradour-Sur-Glane, scene of an SS massacre, and Singer reads like a scene from Clarke’s childhood, “a small foot rocking, / a delicate ankle-bone in grey lisle” until we read, “the waters of the Glane beneath the bridge”. Attractive, insightful poems about Mumbai involve a warm response to community.

There are some more stilted poems here about places and iconic characters, including A Sonnet for Nye and Sleepless. The latter, though a fine panorama of Cardiff at night with many exact observations, has a question-mark over it: would Clarke have written this poem at all if she had not felt the call of duty? At other times, a ‘public poem’ brings the poet’s imagination into play at a deeper level: Architect, about the builder of Cardiff’s grand municipal centre, offers a moment both endearing and dramatic, “bringing a friend to view his work by moonlight, // to see his buildings carved from ice... when moonlight through long windows of the marble hall / cast pages yet to be written.” This is Clarke responding to a city with the sense of awe and delight she might normally bring to wild landscape. Number 8, a rugby poem, is a lighter ‘duty poem’ which conveys real enthusiasm and is one of Clarke’s experiments here in formal form.

One of her most successful strategies is going deep into her own ‘Welshness’. Those ignorant of Wales tend not to know of periods of tension in families and communities about nationalism and the language. Some ambitious Welsh-speaking young people of the past, like my own father in the 1920s, thought the nationalist movement was fuddy-duddy, the Welsh language a caul of infantilism which they left behind with their own infancy. Clarke’s fine poem, Not, brilliantly brings to life the polarisation. Her mother would not say the word ‘Welsh’ but “spat it out like a curse, / a bitterness to be rid of, / to be scoured from her mouth.” Clarke’s own opposite view formed unconsciously with a love of sounds, “the ‘gw’ and ‘w’ of wind and water / the ll-ll-ll of waves on the shore.” With (I sense) scrupulous care, and with particular concern for sound, Clarke imports Welsh phrases into her English. First Words, about learning to love sounds in both languages is a key poem here.

In the midst of this variety of approach and occasional straining, there is a powerful unifying theme, indicated by the title: water. References are so frequent in poems long and short that I wondered if Clarke had toyed with the idea of a book of all ‘water’ poems. This is another way of responding to Wales, “the salt psalm of the sea and the wind’s hymns” (Quayside, a poem about her great-greatgrandfather). However, there is also the joyous poem which celebrates one aspect of human vitality in Mumbai, Man in a Shower, “His two hands are a funnel pouring silver / over his hair, his chest, his human shoulders / with their broken angel wings, the beads of his spine / the ropes of his arms, thighs, the pearl knobs / of his wrists, each foot lifted for a blessing.”

Clarke has further broadened her range in this new collection. This is not the first step away from rural Wales and personal poetry. There have been big moves in this direction over several collections. However, it would be wrong to imply that earlier work was restrictive. Her iconic context of rural landscape has always been a setting for a very rich, rounded response. This book has its own witty and moving poems in the well-loved vein. I much admired Gravity and Wings, for example, two strong love poems, which make the partners (as they often must be) the only human creatures in a lonely landscape, “The moon looks in through wet glass / and dissolves in tears.”