The Silence

A Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation 2024 'The days have no names. The day they count the dead, the day they closed the doors, turned off the lights. We're still here in the silence, hearing tree-talk, the wind's secrets, the company of birds.' ('The Year of the Dead') The poems in Gillian Clarke's The Silence begin during lockdown, to whose silences Clarke listens so attentively that other voices emerge. As the book progresses, that silence deepens, in the poems about her mother and childhood, about the Great War and its aftermaths, and in her continuing attention to Welsh places and names, and the rituals which make that world come in to focus. In these scrupulous, musical poems, Clarke finds consolation in how silence makes room for memory and for the company of the animal- and bird-life which surrounds us. These poems, compulsively returning to key images and formative moments, echo and bring back other ways of living to the book's present moment.

Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke, is a poet and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and ran poetry workshops in primary and secondary schools and for M.Phil. students at the University Of Glamorgan. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. She was the National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. Her poetry is studied by GCSE students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and lives with her architect husband on an eighteen-acre smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they have planted 4,300 trees and care for the land according to conservation practice.