A Recipe for Water

Gillian Clarke

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781857549881
• eBook ISBN: 9781847778130
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The drop of water on the tongue, writes Gillian Clarke, 'was the first word in the world', and the language of water is the element in which these poems live. Ocean currents create histories and cultures - the port cities of Cardiff and Mumbai; myths are born where great rivers have their source high in the mountains. A bottle of spring water contains the mineral elements of life; we can read the earth's deep history in arctic ice. We share the rhythms of migrations in the pull of tides and seasons through rivers and estuaries. In her first collection since becoming the National Poet of Wales in 2008, Gillian Clarke explores water as memory and meaning, the bearer of stories that well up from a personal and collective past to return us to the language of the imagination in which we first named the world.

Severn

A Barge on the Severn

after a painting by Colin Jones (1928–1967)

Where river becomes estuary

before losing its name to the sea,

in water angled by a harbour wall,

on the tilt of the tide’s rise and fall

between mudflats, saltmarsh and flood plain,

a boat with the sea in its lap, or rain.

He could have put the river to bed,

baled out the barge, drowned to its gunwale

in flood, in the hope of letting it float.

But he caught the hour and held it,

the cruciform spars of the stern where light

and a salt wind off the channel

still make its lost sail snap in a cross wind,

and the colours brought home in his mind

– red flaking and faded to rose,

and the blue-green of water – have held

forty years, while he, the barge, a particular

hour, timbers, molecules, pigment, particles,

are swept with the soils and silts of Pumlimon

to become the Severn.

Source

After hours plodding uphill in something between

rain and an Atlantic haar, we have come to this:

two thousand feet above the Irish Sea,

a pane of ice, and a muscle of pooling water,

Pumlimon, where five rivers rise, a squelch

of tussocky bog, and the cairn, Garn-fach Bugeilyn,

where story tells us Cai and Bedwyr stood

‘in the highest wind in the world’.

We witness a birth, uncertain of what is born,

though we see it’s alive, its pulsing placenta,

Hafren, Sabrina, gurgling out of the earth,

headwaters of a stream that will augment

to a headlong hurtling force ready to swallow

Vyrnwy, Stour, Teme, Avon, Afon and Wye,

to bring mountain waters to lap at the thresholds

of cities, to bear off the dead, to shove its way

through limestone in the gorge at Ironbridge,

to be fluent under bridges, to open its hands

letting its multiple muscular waters spread,

to become the estuary, to be lost in the sea.

Sabrina

There is a gentle nymph not far from hence

That with moist curb sways the smooth Severn stream.

Sabrina is her name, a virgin pure

Milton, ‘Comus’

Before history there was mythology.

Fingerprinted between the strata of story

Is the human sign. We make a guess

At who they were, and where and why it was.

How the daughter of faithless Locrinus drowned

Between an Ice Age and the Age of Stone

To become the river-goddess, a curb in the river.

Today in these fast waters you might glimpse

In the sway of the currents the white limbs

Of a girl caught in a shoal of silvers

Turning and turning in the turbulence

Among migrating sal...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Table of Contents
• First Words
• A Pocket Dictionary
• Glas y Dorlan
• Not
• Otter
• The Fox and the Girl
• ‘Sgwarnog
• Nettles
• A T-Mail to Keats
• Fflam
• The Ledbury Muse
• A Recipe for Water
• Severn
• Mumbai
• Glacier
• The Reader’s Digest Atlas of the World
• City
• Afon Tâf
• Architect
• Coins
• Llandâf Cathedral
• Sleepless
• Subway
• The Rising Tide
• Welsh
• Stadium
• Letting the Light In
• House of Dreams
• A Sonnet for Nye
• Mercury
• Welsh Gold
• Horsetail
• Kites
• Death’s Head Hawkmoth Caterpillar
• Oradour-sur-Glane
• Singer
• Storm over Limousin
• Landscape with Farm
• The Accompanist
• Bach at St Davids
• Cattle, Hayfield, Storm
• Gravity
• Wings
• Pegging Out
• Love at Livebait
• Revival
• Castell y Bere
• Old Libraries
• The Oak Wood
• Library Chair
• Quayside
• Farewell Finisterre
• December
• About the Author
• Also by Gillian Clarke from Carcanet Press
• Copyright