A Winter's Blogpost ~ CookingFood.Org

Gillian Clarke, author of the
T S Eliot-shortlisted Ice
Photo © Adrian Pope

As the temperatures continue to drop, we thought we'd share some appropriately seasonal poetry for the weekend.

This month, Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize for her latest collection, Ice. The harsh winters of 2009 and 2010 moved Gillian Clarke to re-examine her relationship with nature: it breathes and sings; snow flies at the moon, a swan searches tirelessly for his mate, death twinkles in the eyes of a polar bear rug.

Here, in her new collection Clarke shares with us her explorations, her questions and her curious findings. Her ear is attentive, and the sounds bewitching: ‘the high far hum of ice, / strung sound, feather fall, a sigh of rime...’

Polar

Snowlight and sunlight, the lake glacial.
Too bright to open my eyes
in the dazzle and doze
of a distant January afternoon.

It’s long ago and the house naps in the plush silence
of a house asleep, like absence,
I’m dreaming on the white bear’s shoulder,
paddling the slow hours, my fingers in his fur.

His eyes are glass, each hair a needle of light.
He’s pegged by his claws to the floor like a shirt on the line.
He is a soul. He is what death is. He is transparency,
a loosening floe on the sea.

But I want him alive.
I want him fierce
with belly and breath and growl and beating heart,
I want him dangerous,

I want to follow him over the snows
between the immaculate earth and now,
between the silence and the shot that rang
over the ice at the top of the globe,

when the map of the earth was something we knew by heart,
and they had not shot the bear,
had not loosed the ice,
had not, had not…

Ice was launched at a reading in Waterstone's Deansgate, Manchester, on National Poetry Day last year. In case you didn't get a chance to attend, you can watch a clip from the launch: