Roots Home

By Gillian Clarke

2021

First Published

4.13

Average Rating

223

Number of Pages

6H46M

Audio Length

Wales' best-loved contemporary poet, one of our major poets of our endangered environment, returns to prose in Roots Home . As in At the Source (2008), she does something unusual with form. She combines two elements. Seven vivid essay-meditations, informed by (among others) Dylan Thomas, George Herbert, and W.B. Yeats, explore the ways in which poetry bears witness to what is and what might be, presence and transcendence in a threatened world. The meditations precede a journal that runs from January 2018 to December 2020, concluding with a poem entitled 'Winter Solstice'—three years of living close to animals, mountains, and (in particular) trees, in human intimacy and lockdown. The flown, the fallen, the golden ones, the deciduous dead, all gone to ground, to dust, to sand, borne on the shoulders of the wind. Listen! They are whispering now while the world talks, and the ice melts, and the seas rise. Look at the trees! Every leaf-scar is a bud expecting a future. The earth speaks in parables. The burning bush. The rainbow. Promises. Promises. This is necessary work. As she declares in 'Why I Write,' the first meditation in Roots Home : 'Morning begins with my journal. I write in it most days, though not every day. It is friend and listener, to record, remember, rage and rhapsodise, a place for requiem and celebration. Words hold detail which might be forgotten - the way the hare halted as it crossed the lawn, the field where a rainbow touched down across the valley, the different voices of wind, or water, the close and distant territorial arias of May blackbirds.'

Avg Rating

4.13

Number of Ratings

5 STARS

63%

4 STARS

3 STARS

25%

2 STARS

13%

1 STARS

goodreads

Author

Gillian Clarke

Author · 17 books

Gillian Clarke is one of the central figures in contemporary Welsh poetry, the third to take up the post of National Poet of Wales. Her own poems have achieved widespread critical and popular acclaim (her Selected Poems has gone through seven printings and her work is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain) but she has also made her cultural mark through her inspirational role as a teacher, as editor of the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 - 1984, and as founder and President of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales. Clarke currently runs an organic small-holding in Ceredigion, the Welsh landscape is a shaping force in her work, together with recurrent themes of war, womanhood and the passage of time. Her last three books have all been Poetry Book Society Recommendations.