Zoology

Gillian Clarke

• Publisher: Carcanet Poetry
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781784102173
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie

Longlisted for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry

Zoology is Gillian Clarke's ninth Carcanet collection, following her T. S. Eliot Prize-shortlisted Ice. The collection opens with a glimpse of hare, whose 'heartbeat halts at the edge of the lawn', holding us 'in the planet of its stare'. Within this millisecond of mutual arrest, a well of memories draws us into the Welsh landscape of the poet's childhood: her parents, the threat of war, the richness of nature as experienced by a child. In the second of the collection's six parts we find ourselves in the Zoology Museum, whose specimens stare back from their cases: the Snowdon rainbow beetle, the marsh fritillary, the golden lion tamarin. 'Will we be this beautiful when we pass into the silence, behind glass?' In later sections the poet invites us to Hafod Y Llan, the Snowdonian nature reserve rich in Alpine flowers and abandoned mineshafts, 'where darkness laps at the brink of a void deep as cathedrals'. Clarke captures a complete cycle of seasons on the land, its bounty and hardship, from the spring lamb 'birthed like a fish / steaming in moonlight' to the ewe bearing her baby 'in the funeral boat of her body'. The poems tap into a powerful, feminist empathy that sees beyond differentiations of species to an understanding deeper than knowledge, something subterranean, running through the land. Zoology closes with a series of elegies to friends, poets and peers, and poems remembering victims of war and tyrannical regimes. 'Like a bird picking over / the September lawn, / I gather their leaves. / This is what silence is.' Then our hare, that 'flight of sinew and gold', is spotted one last time: 'a silvering wind crossing a field, / two ears alert in a gap / then gone'.

V

INSECT

Over the black granite worktop

where I polish the fossilised dead,

a creature too small to discern

dances on shimmering wings.

Don’t set down a plate, a pot

till it’s safely flown.

Don’t let the light of the world be less

by a single glimmering thing.

QUEEN

Ice has locked the frozen garden

these cold days of December.

The stone man’s shawled and cowled.

The iron man’s lap’s a brim of cold.

Inside, lamps lit for evening, the room warms,

flames climb in the stove, and nightly

she walks, stirred from the hushed dust

of a curtain-fold, steps out to preen,

summer’s future in her winter dream.

We’re careful not to crush or brush aside

the pregnant queen. She clings to my finger

as I set her safe beside my open book,

settles herself in yellow lamplight

to clean her six hinged limbs,

abdomen, mandibles, helmet of black and gold,

multiple eyes, thorax, wings of spun glass

veined like petals of wild plum, quince,

apple trees fertilised on humming days.

Her wintering body’s a citadel

of a thousand cells. In spring she’ll build

her palace from spittle and cellulose

scraped from the timbers of our house,

and lay her eggs in a thousand cradles

pulsing with the humdrum psalm of summer.

WATCHMAN

The Newport Ship, sixteenth-century, discovered 2002

In perpetual dusk, in the shallows

of a tank in an industrial shed, a shadow,

a loneliness I can’t quite sense

or put a name to; a dark silence

slow as cloud. The shadow stirs

in murky water, creature, stranger,

nightwatchman, grazer of estuaries, scourer

of an old ships’ bones in this watery harbour,

it feeds on micro-organisms brought ashore

from burial in the mudbanks of the Usk.

A great ship lifted, board by strut by spar

out of six hundred years of river mud,

a ghost of wind in its sails and a hushing ocean,

subdued in a tank, in the watch of a sturgeon.

HOW TO PUT TOGETHER A ROBIN

It takes four hands to mend a robin

snagged in this snare, a tangle of netting

draped to keep birds off the blueberries.

You cradle the bird, its heart wild in your hand,

its breath a puff in your palm, your soul

a flame i...