The timeless and compelling 'word-music' of one of Britain's oldest cultural treasures is captured in this new bilingual edition. The Gododdin charts the rise and fall of 363 warriors in the battle of Catraeth, around the year AD 600. The men of the Brittonic kingdom of Gododdin rose to unite the Welsh and the Picts against the Angles, only to meet a devastating fate. Composed by the poet Aneirin, the poem was originally orally transmitted as a sung elegy, passed down for seven centuries before being written down in early Welsh by two medieval scribes. It is composed of one hundred laments to the named characters who fell, and follows a sophisticated alliterative poetics. Former National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke animates this historical epic with a modern musicality, making it live in the language of today and underscoring that, in a world still beset by the misery of war, Aneirin's lamentation is not done.

What does it mean to say that a human being is body and soul, and how does each affect the other? Late antique philosophers, Christians included, asked these central questions. The papers collected here explore their answers, and use those answers to ask further questions, reading Iamblichus, Porphyry, Augustine and others in their social and intellectual context. Among the topics dealt with are the following. Humans are mortal rational beings, so how does the mortal body affect the rational soul? The body needs food: what foods are best for the soul, and is it right to eat animal foods if animals are less rational than humans? The body is gendered for reproduction: are reason and the soul also gendered? Ascetic lifestyles may free our bodies from the limitations of gender and desire, so that our souls are free to reconnect with the divine; but this need must be balanced with the claims of family and society. Philosophers asked whether life in the body is exile for the soul; Christians defended their claim that body as well as soul would live after death, and even the smallest fragment of a martyr's body is proof of resurrection.

The Pythagorean Life is the most extensive surviving source on Pythagoreanism, and has wider interest as an account of the religious aspirations of late antiquity.

What does it mean to say that a human being is body and soul, and how does each affect the other? Late antique philosophers, Christians included, asked these central questions. The papers collected here explore their answers, and use those answers to ask further questions, reading Iamblichus, Porphyry, Augustine and others in their social and intellectual context. Among the topics dealt with are the following. Humans are mortal rational beings, so how does the mortal body affect the rational soul? The body needs food: what foods are best for the soul, and is it right to eat animal foods if animals are less rational than humans? The body is gendered for reproduction: are reason and the soul also gendered? Ascetic lifestyles may free our bodies from the limitations of gender and desire, so that our souls are free to reconnect with the divine; but this need must be balanced with the claims of family and society. Philosophers asked whether life in the body is exile for the soul; Christians defended their claim that body as well as soul would live after death, and even the smallest fragment of a martyr's body is proof of resurrection.

This volume presents the Latin text of one of the great classics of Christian literature, accompanied by a commentary. Confessions is concerned with one human life as an example of what it is to be human and in search of God. In books I-IV, Augustine reflects on his infancy and childhood, adolescent rebellion and student days, and his early teaching career. The commentary, which can be used by those new to Augustine and his world, concentrates on his brilliant Latin and on his theology and philosophy.

Selected Poems gathers together the best of Gillian Clarke's poetry in a single volume. National Poet of Wales, winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry award, Clarke is one of the best-known names in UK poetry today, as well as one of the most popular poets on the school curriculum. Over the past four decades her work has examined nature, womanhood, art, music, Welsh history - and always with the lyric and imagistic precision by which her poetry is instantly recognisable. But perhaps her greatest inspiration is the Welsh landscape and all the human stories that it hosts: as UK Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy has said, 'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths'. Selected Poems shows the great compass and interdependence of those two domains, and presents the finest work from one of the most important figures in poetry today.

Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. This bilingual edition of her later poetry includes work from "Cell Angel" (1996) and "Blind Man's Kiss/Cusan Dyn Dall" (2001), as well as the first English translations of "Perffaith Nam" (2005) and a selection of new poems. 'These poems engage as deeply as ever with Menna Elfyn's treasured themes of possession and dispossession, the terrible vulnerability of those things which are precious and her joyously affirmative, inclusive views on how they may be protected. Her characteristic concern for humanity everywhere and her loving but uncompromising view of the conundrums of women's lives are framed here in a more reflective vein, but with her characteristic humour and sideways wit. She is a witty, gentle, compassionate gatekeeper between Wales and the wider world, her work as a poet constantly explaining, excusing and extolling each to the other' - Elin ap Hywel. 'Menna Elfyn is the firebird of the Welsh language, bright, indomitably modern and as indestructible as the phoenix. She gives hope to all writers in lesser spoken languages that great things can rise from the ashes' - Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill. 'Elfyn is a poet of healing...both compassionate and celebratory. Like a soul doctor she questions and probes, like St Teresa she endures the darkness, but in the end she sings a song which affirms that flawed humanity is indeed perfectible' - Katie Gramich, Planet.

Bondo is Menna Elfyn's latest collection in Welsh and English. Her title means eaves in Welsh, referring to poems about getting close to language as sanctuary. Other poems were written episodically over a number of years. These meditative poems began simply as a personal engagement with the grief of Aberfan, expressing solidarity with a nation's wound. Bondo is also the voice which echoes the role of the Welsh bard as remembrancer. Menna Elfyn is the best-known, most travelled and most translated of all Welsh-language poets. The extraordinary international range of her subjects, breathtaking inventiveness and generosity of vision place her among Europe's leading poets. Like her previous Bloodaxe titles, Bondo is a bilingual Welsh-English edition. Again, the facing English translations are by leading Welsh poets, in this case Elin ap Hywel, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Robert Minhinnick. It is her first new book since Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007 and the later collection Murmur (2012), a Poetry Book Society Recommended Translation.

War's Nomads is an evocative account of one man's experience of life in a mobile radar unit after the battle of El Alamein as Rommel's AfrikaKorps was relentlessly pursued across the desert through Egypt, Libya and Tunisia by the Eighth Army. It is the only known detailed account in existence of the small radar units who played a key part in the Western Desert Campaign. A budding professional writer and grammar school master, Fred Grice had a keen eye for detail and ear for language, which he assiduously employed after he was called up in 1941, keeping two journals of his experiences. The first,'On Draft' deals with waiting to embark after initial training, with the journey to the battle zone, and the privations of a low-ranking AC. Daily life on board ship is vividly brought to life with details of routine, the cramped conditions, the banter and pastimes used to pass the time by the troops, and the by contrast luxurious existence of the officers. The second, 'Erk in the Desert' gives a detailed account of the activities of Unit 606, a radar crew that follows just behind the battlefront. 606 provides radio-detection for the advanced landing grounds being used by RAF fighter-bomber squadrons, because these landing strips, in turn, are the target of the German Luftwaffe and the Italian Air Force attacks. 606 was a tiny unit, never more than 10 men, often operating for protracted periods in complete isolation. Fred's account vividly and lyrically evokes the landscape and the often tense and dangerous environment they operated in, pitching the reader into the experience of travelling with the unit in a 3-ton lorry, finding ingenious solutions to lack of rations and living space, even commandeering an abandoned boat to relax in the sea, whilst constantly needing to be alert to dodge air attacks. An authoritative introduction explains the background to the military events of the Western Desert campaign, and the purpose of 606's mission, which Fred for security reasons cannot talk about: to get to a selection of the 200 or so landing grounds in the desert with all speed; and then to defend them against air attack by using a light warning set (radar) developed to go operational within an hour. War's Nomads sheds light on a key but little known aspect of the Eighth Army's Western Desert Campaign, the first in British military history in which the RAF and the army collaborated so closely. But much more than that it is a human story by a gifted writer that recreates a lost time and landscapes.

The Map and the Clock is a celebration of the most scintillating poems ever composed on our islands.Curated by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, and by Gillian Clarke, National Poet of Wales, this anthology gathers fourteen centuries of extraordinary verse - beginning with the first writings from the old languages of England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and culminating in some of our most recent poets, speaking in our present-day tongues. Many of our founding myths and legends are told here - King Arthur and Gawain, Beowulf and Mad Sweeney, the Mabinogion - as are the nursery-tales and songs we still sing today. Through these pages we witness the tragedy of European wars and world conflict; we court romance and friendship; we explore nationhood and belonging, identity and belief; and we are welcomed to a celebration of the cultural diversity of the poetries of our twenty-first century.The Map and the Clock is a stunning and essential treasury of the poems that have moulded our languages, examined our worlds, and shaped our islands through time.

"The King of Britain's Daughter" has been specially commissioned as the text of an oratorio for the 1993 Hay on Wye Festival, and is based on the story in the Mabinogion of Branwen, the daughter of Llyr. Family legend associated the story with Fforest, the family farm, where the giant's footprint is preserved as a rock pool, and Fforest and Welsh legend have provided the inspiration for this part of the book, which also contains a variety of other vivid and memorable poems.

Shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year 2022. Wales's best-loved contemporary poet, one of the 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. 'Listen! They are whispering / now while the world talks, / and the ice melts, / and the seas rise. / Look at the trees!...' 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.'

The title sequence of Making the Beds for the Dead charts the journey of a virus in 'the plague year'. Come from outer space, it travels - on a fox's paw, the beak of a kite and a crow and a buzzard - into the very heart of our lives. The poet includes personal, verses and stories from farmers in her family and neighbourhood. The open structure allows the Gillian Clarke to include her seven rock poems, written for the National Botanic Garden of Wales; her poems based in archaeology; and her poems about war, and urban violence. There is an instinctive and a deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book. The poet remains true to her landscapes and her nation. The sequence 'The Physicians of Myddfai', nine sonnets for Aberglasne, and much else is included in this characteristically generous and engaging volume by Wales' best-loved poet.

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'.

The poems in Gillian Clarke's Five Fields break new ground. Known as a poet of rural themes and of Wales, in this book she engages with the city in its human and material diversity. Having spent time as Writer in residence at the Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, she came into close touch with another kind of music, and with the different spaces it occupies, the different demands it makes on performers and audiences. There are poems from Bosnia, France and the Mediterranean coast, and poems from the landscape we most readily associate with this best-loved of Welsh poets: Wales, its people and its creatures.

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.

"At the Source" reflects upon a writer's deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets. Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet's imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer's year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.