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'.
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