All That is Wales

by Professor M. Wynn Thomas

  That Hughes was a very important presence in the mind of the young Gillian Clarke is not, of course, to be disputed. So, too, undoubtedly was Seamus Heaney, whose significance for her – again so frequently diminished and distorted in easy prattle about ‘influence’ – she has subtly explained:

  A poet like Seamus Heaney has a tremendously feminine sensibility, and because Seamus Heaney is such an extremely good poet, he admitted possibilities that weren’t there before, which women are now exploring. To put it another way, more women began to be published, which enabled us to see a poet like Seamus Heaney. I wonder whether he would have been so well received by an earlier generation, when feminine values were less noticed and admired. (UI, 28–9)

  It is the mutuality of the indebtedness that is fruitfully insisted upon here, and indeed Clarke demonstrates exactly what she means in the accomplished early poem ‘Lunchtime Lecture’, clearly an interesting variant on Heaney’s celebrated Bog Queen poems. (Although it is interesting to note that an English translation of ‘Geneth Ifanc’ [‘Young Girl’], Waldo Williams’s familiar Welsh-language poem about the feelings of kinship awakened in him by the ‘stone skeleton’ from the Iron Age, was printed directly following Clarke’s first poems in Poetry Wales.) The moment of her encounter with the skeleton of a young female from the second or third millennium BC at once reproduces, in an entirely different key and setting, Heaney’s mental exhumation of a long-buried life, and claims a kind of priority over it, since there is between Clarke and her subject an intuitive understanding, based on shared gender experience, to which he can lay no claim: ‘She’s a tree in winter, …/ I, at some other season, …/ We stare at each other, dark into sightless/ Dark’.9 It is as if Clarke had been admitted by Heaney into a world of experience which was already hers by right, and which her sex had in the first instance made available to her.

  In fact, the supportive presence of pioneering women writers is as palpable in Clarke’s early texts as is the influence of her prominent male contemporaries. Sylvia Plath’s ‘Morning Song’, the opening poem in Ariel (1965),10 seems in some way to foreshadow, and in a sense to make possible, the poem ‘Baby Sitting’, with which Clarke’s first collection Snow on the Mountain (1971) opens. Except, of course, that Plath’s distinguishing note of raw self-exposure is missing from Clarke’s altogether more gentle and composed poem of self-knowledge. That difference seems to determine, as much as to be determined by, their respective choice of subject, with Plath owning up to her resentful attachments to her selfishly demanding brat of a baby that seems like a mere monstrous automaton of need, and Clarke, markedly less daring, reflecting guiltily on her cold, nervous imperviousness to the blind demands of a baby that is not her own. But elsewhere in Snow on the Mountain she, too, probes as deep as the vein of anger and resentment that can run through maternal love. In ‘Catrin’, she explores, in her perhaps too conciliatory way, the struggle for separateness that locks mother and teenage daughter into a newly intense relationship.

  Relationships are, in fact, at the heart (in every sense) of Clarke’s early poetry. Indeed, in three of the quartet of poems she originally published in Poetry Wales she defines herself in terms of her relationship with somebody else. Moreover, her coming into new being, as described in ‘Beech Buds’, is imaged as issuing directly from an immersion of self in another’s ‘brightness’. Such a generously joyous image of powerless indebtedness seems strikingly un-masculine, and seems, further, to anticipate that sense of female selfhood, and that view of female writing, that Gillian Clarke was later to expound in her prose. ‘Men’, she wrote in an important essay in the Bloodaxe catalogue,

  often observe themselves in poems. They cast themselves into roles. It is called ‘being objective’. Craig Raine sees himself as Shakespeare in one poem. Seamus Heaney sees himself as Wordsworth. Less famously, men see themselves as fathers, sons, lovers, and their poems are often written from that objective, observed viewpoint.

  By contrast, she goes on to argue,

  Women often move halfway into a role, the transition incomplete and felt rather than seen … Is it that women spend their lives in uncertainty, never quite the hunter-gatherer or the Madonna-mistress? Certainly they show a markedly greater interest in the detail and subtlety of relationships.11

  The quartet of poems in Poetry Wales that signalled Gillian Clarke’s arrival on the scene did not for some reason include ‘The Sundial’, the poem (her first for many years) that really marked the genesis of her poetry, and which she later selected to be the title-poem of her second (though first substantial) collection of poems. Recording a day spent caring for her sick youngest child, this ‘relationship’ poem typifies several important aspects of Clarke’s early poetry.

  It is a domestic piece, thus adumbrating one of the basic tenets of that female (as opposed to feminist) poetics that Clarke began shortly later to construct, in piecemeal fashion, through her occasional writings. In an Anglo-Welsh Review editorial published in 1979 she argued that

  the likeliest subjects of female writing [are] the domestic and familiar, and the way of looking at relationships, places, objects, and society that is inclined to be minutely perceptive and detailed. It is an under-valued perception and ‘domestic’ and ‘familiar’ are too frequently taken to be derogatory words. The ‘domus’ is one of our society’s most unheard messages, powerhouse as that place is for every emerging adult.12

  Elsewhere she has retrospectively dubbed these early poems ‘indoorscapes’, indicating they were ‘artlessly, instinctively written, and that mood ended with publication’.13 She has also drawn attention to their ‘presentness’, that is their preoccupation with the pressing, though passing, concerns of the invariably crowded domestic moment, a feature particularly evident in a poem that starts, as does ‘The Sundial’, ‘Owain was ill today’ (S, 11), and a characteristic that may betray the continuity between these early attempts at poetry and her already well-established practice of keeping a diary of the day’s events.

  A less immediately evident, but ultimately perhaps more significant, aspect of the poem is its manner of investigating the workings of the imagination. The feverish boy has been delirious during the night, ‘shouting of lions/ In the sleepless heat’. Now, still ‘slightly/ Trembling with fever’, he patiently fashions a sundial out of paper, a stick and some stones, in order to calculate ‘the mathematics of sunshine’. His mother is struck by his new-found, silent, adult-like concentration:

  he found

  Deliberation, and the slow finger

  Of light, quieter than night lions. (S, 11)

  That aspect of the poem – its focusing on a moment when the boy begins to probe for hidden patterns of energy and to trace invisible rhythms of light – becomes much more apparent when it is read in the context of the other poems in Snow on the Mountain, the little booklet of poems by Clarke that was published as Number Five of the Triskel Poets series in 1971.

  The title-poem of that collection is itself full of what, on the analogy of ‘The Sundial’, one might call ‘the mathematics of snow’. In other words, it shows how new angles on reality emerge as one struggles to find one’s bearings in a world rendered strange, blankly elemental, and apparently featureless by snow. So the family, out to clamber up the snow-covered heights of the hills around Machen, fixes its attention on a bird:

  A crow cut a clean line

  Across the hill, which we grasped as a rope

  To pull us up the pale diagonal.14

  This heightened attention to, and trust in, the draughtsmanship and texture of the visible is deeply characteristic of a poet one of whose greatest loves is the visual arts. And such a passion for form and colour is everywhere evident in her work – so in the wake of a vixen’s death all the reds in a day that had begun ‘warm with colour’ grow cold, and, elsewhere, a cow standing up creates the chiaroscuro effect of ‘cool/ Flanks, like white flowers in the dark’ (SM, 22). But it is not only that Clarke is a painterly poet; she is also a po
et for whom language itself is a thickly sensuous medium, a medium to the enchantment of which one needs almost languorously to submit, so that it can then be intuitively worked, as a painter works paint, until unexpected forms of meaning seem miraculously to appear. As she has explained, ‘After pen and paper, the beauty of the empty cleanness, there is energy. It sets me thinking. I try the paper to see what the words will do. It must be like drawing … try the line, see what happens.’15 The echo of Paul Klee’s celebrated description of drawing as taking a line for a walk is unmistakeable here.

  The new discoveries that come only through the suspension of conventional rational intelligence and its spuriously authoritative categories of description have been a constant preoccupation of Clarke’s over the years. She has, for instance, confessed her attraction to

  the new nature poems [which] are scientific rather than lyrical, concerned but not romantic. They aim to match the precision of metaphor and word-patterns to the clarity of the fact. They relish the patterning of things, the connections between the worlds of nature and ideas. (OSL, 292)

  The analogy with her own work is evident, except that her means of achieving the same ends are somewhat different. She has always on the one hand been drawn to mythopoeic descriptions, whose devastating power to re-form reality she has repeatedly distinguished from arbitrary fantasy (her son’s night-lions) while on the other being attracted to rhythms and patterns (of both sound and perception) that involve profound realignments of reason.

  So ‘Community’, the concluding poem in Snow on the Mountain, appropriately speaks of how, in company,

  one can stand aside and watch

  The spatial movement, understanding

  Edge forward, falter and change

  Form. (SM, 30)

  Elsewhere in the collection, too, deepening understanding is troped in terms of forms described in space. ‘Lines’ centres on the way a scene, and with it the day, is intersected diagonally by the wavering edge of a washing line, which comes to represent ‘That wound of the divided/ Mind’ (SM, 20). ‘Waterfall’ is about following the path that

  led me under the fall to feel

  The arc of the river and the mountain’s exact

  Weight; the roar of rain and lapwings

  Leaving: water-beat, heart-fall in accord. (SM, 14)

  And already embryonically apparent in these early poems is ‘that sense of moving from one image to another as if searching, as if not fully committed to a role, the metaphor not seen but felt’ (H-g, 20). So memories of giving birth register as a feeling of ‘satisfaction/ Fall[ing] like a clean sheet around me’ (SM, 22), and the head of a dead curlew chick ‘Loll[s] from the snapped stem of its neck/ Like the hung clock of a dandelion/ Wasting its seed’ (SM, 24).

  Remarks such as the above about images and metaphors are really fragments of Gillian Clarke’s female poetics, a poetics, grounded in her developing understanding of female experience, upon which she has been unsystematically at work, virtually since she began to publish her poems. So, for instance, her own early awareness of having constantly to shift roles from wife to mother to housewife to teacher to editor to poet underlies her emphasis on the provisional, exploratory and tentative nature of the stances and images women tend fluidly to produce in their writings: such, she suggests, is also the magically unpredictable and unstable world which the Mabinogion conjures up for us. This has further led her to reflect on the subversively shifting sense of perspective and scale that a woman’s constantly changing role, or theatre of operations, entails. For Clarke, therefore, a woman is naturally possessed of a power to tilt the world off its familiar axis, that convulsive power of the artistic imagination that has traditionally been figured through stories of giants like Bendigeidfran. Similarly, her association of poetry with energies and rhythms of intuition that are anterior to consciousness relates in part to her theory of female psychological development:

  The girl-child often has an early advantage in language-skills, is likely to talk earlier, to learn to read sooner than a boy and to prefer imaginative literature. Words store memory, ‘Nothing is until it has a word’ (‘Llŷr’ 1982). Women oftener record memories of babyhood than men and thus draw more deeply on the first physical, animal sensations of infancy, where body and mind are single, fact and imagination indivisible. It is not clear that men never share this characteristic, as Heaney proves, but that it is rarer in men, and might even be said to be commonplace in women. (OSL, 288)

  The ascertainable truth of this statement probably matters less than its capacity, as belief or modern myth, to enable or to empower women to write. Indeed, Clarke’s own writing, at first womanly only in fairly superficial though significant ways, could be said to have been deepened and enriched through that continuing exploration of female identity she has undertaken primarily in her poetry and secondarily in her complementary prose.

  That awakening to herself as poet, which entailed new explorations of herself as woman, seems further to have involved, in Gillian Clarke’s case, the beginning of a process of personal reintegration which was grounded, so to speak, at Blaen Cwrt, the dilapidated farm cottage in rural west Wales that came into her possession in the early 1970s. Indeed, the importance of this location is perceptively noted by Sam Adams in his Introduction to Snow on the Mountain, a document that is a valuable record of how Clarke’s emergence as a poet was at that time viewed by an individual closely connected with it and with her:

  The revival of her creative interest in poetry coincided with the finding of a cottage in Cardiganshire where the family now spend as much time as possible. Many of her poems are about this quieter world, far removed from the suburbia of Cardiff, much more closely associated with the rhythms of the seasons. Here she observes the constantly changing patterns of nature, the integration of rural landscape, bird and beast. All this she records with superb delicacy and tact, finding in her experience of motherhood analogies for the fertility of the natural world and the pangs of birth and separation. She takes as her main themes areas of life infrequently explored in poetry and very rarely indeed illuminated with such honesty and insight – the interplay of relationships within the family, and the family observed against the background of nature.

  Only later, with the publication not only of The King of Britain’s Daughter but also of two important essays associated with the writing of that volume’s title sequence, did it become possible to understand fully what that part of Ceredigion in which Blaen Cwrt is situated actually means to Gillian Clarke.16 For her it represents her idyllic childhood retreat, that spot of time (to adopt, and adapt Wordsworth’s celebrated phrase) where her artistic sensibility was nurtured, where she grew unawares into a writer, where the tensions between her parents (symbolised, as she has put it, by their quarrels over the Welsh language) could be magically suspended, where she felt snugly secluded and yet (thanks to her radio-engineer father) tuned in to the wavelength of the whole wide world, where the landscape was haunted and sculpted by giant imagination, and where she felt as ladied by her grandmother and nature as the boy Dylan Thomas had felt lorded at Fern Hill. Although her actual home, both as a child and later as a wife and mother, was in Cardiff, she was most really and truly at home in west Wales. As she has written,

  The fact that literature, from nursery rhyme and fairy story onwards, was so closely associated with the natural world, has played a strong part in making me a country person, not an urban one, even during the long years of my life spent in the city. Literature hallowed the natural with the supernatural. It made the stones sing. It populated the countryside with animals, seen and unseen. It made natural phenomena reverberate with mythological meaning, turned a rocking stone to a giant’s apple, a rock pool to a footprint. (OSL, 280)

  It would be wrong to bring all these insights with which Clarke provided us in the nineties to bear uncritically on her poetry of the 1970s – wrong not least because as she has made clear it is only by painful degrees that she herself came to understand her ch
ildhood, and its locations, in these terms. Nevertheless, to read her early poem ‘Blaen Cwrt’ with a judicious degree of hindsight is not only to appreciate anew the terms in which it consciously celebrates a rediscovered community with place, and a place with its own unique community, it is also to sense for the first time the unconscious feelings working like yeast and helping the phrases swell to such a rich fullness of meaning.