Description

Shortlisted for the Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry 2025

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.

Publisher Review

‘Gillian Clarke is one of the most widely respected and deeply loved poets in the world’ – Carol Ann Duffy; ‘Clarke has a direct line to the natural world. She paints the Welsh landscape without idealising or romanticising, and in the process shows that nature doesn’t need to be elevated to inspire a quiet awe.’ – Financial Times