Rarely did ancient authors write about the lives of women; even more rarely did they write about the lives of ordinary women: not queens or heroines who influenced war or politics, not sensational examples of virtue or vice, not Christian martyrs or ascetics, but women of moderate status, who experienced everyday joys and sorrows and had everyday merits and failings. Such a woman was Monica-now Saint Monica because of her relationship with her son Augustine, who wrote about her in the Confessions and elsewhere. Despite her rather unremarkable life, Saint Monica has inspired a robust controversy in academia, the Church, and the Augustine-reading public alike: some agree with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who knew Monica, that Augustine was exceptionally blessed in having such a mother, while others think that Monica is a classic example of the manipulative mother who lives through her son, using religion to repress his sexual life and to control him even when he seems to escape. In Monica: An Ordinary Saint, Gillian Clark reconciles these competing images of Monica's life and legacy, arriving at a woman who was shrewd and enterprising, but also meek and gentle. Weighing Augustine's discussion of his mother against other evidence of women's lives in late antiquity, Clark achieves portraits both of Monica individually, and of the many women like her. Augustine did not claim that his mother was a saint, but he did think that the challenges of everyday life required courage and commitment to Christian principle. Monica's ordinary life, as both he and Clark tell it, showed both. Monica: An Ordinary Saint illuminates Monica, wife and mother, in the context of the societal expectations and burdens that shaped her and all ordinary women.

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.

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.

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 Welsh publishing house Gwasg Gomer published Gillian Clarke's first full collection of poems, The Sundial, in 1978. In the twenty years since then the poet has become one of the best-loved and most widely read writers of Wales, well-known for her readings, for her radio work and her workshops. Gillian Clarke is a severe critic of her own poems--Collected Poems includes all that she wishes to preserve of her work to date.

Early Christianity in the context of Roman society raises important questions for historians, sociologists of religion and theologians alike. This work explores the differing perspectives arising from a changing social and academic culture. Key issues concerning early Christianity are addressed, such as how early Christian accounts of pagans, Jews and heretics can be challenged and the degree to which Christian groups offered support to their members and to those in need. The work examines how non-Christians reacted to the spectacle of martyrdom and to Christian reverence for relics. Questions are also raised about why some Christians encouraged others to abandon wealth, status and gender-roles for extreme ascetic lifestyles and about whether Christian preachers trained in classical culture offered moral education to all or only to the social elite. The interdisciplinary and thematic approach offers the student of early Christianity a comprehensive treatment of its role and influence in Roman society.

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.

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.'

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.

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'.

This volume in honour of Miriam Griffin brings together seventeen international specialists. Their essays range from Socrates to late antiquity, with a particular focus on Cicero. Subjects covered include the Stoics and Cynics, Roman law, the formulation of imperial power, Jews and Christians, 'performance philosophy', Augustine, late Platonism, and women philosophers.

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.

This is the second volume in a series of commentaries on Augustine's City of God (De civitate Dei). Books 6-10 are Augustine's answer to those who think that many gods should be worshipped for blessings in the life to come. In Books 1-5 he had replied to those who thought many gods should be worshipped for blessings in this mortal life; he expected this next task to be more challenging, because he must engage with outstanding philosophers who have much in common with Christians. In Books 6-10, he makes the task manageable by selecting very short extracts, all in Latin, from his target authors: on interpretations of Roman myth and cult (books 6-7) the learned Varro, Divine Matters, and Seneca On Superstition; on daimones (Books 8-9) Apuleius, On the God of Socrates, and Asclepius, ascribed to Hermes Trismegistus; on Platonist philosophy (Book 10) translated quotations from Plotinus and Porphyry. Augustine aims to show that the many gods are deceptive demons who want worship for themselves and cannot mediate between mortals and the immortal divine. Especially in Book 10, he contrasts these demons with the good angels who want us to be blessed as they are by worshipping the true God, and with the true mediator Jesus Christ who in his incarnation united humanity with God. Platonist philosophers, Augustine argues, despise the body and aspire to reach the divine by superior intellect; for ordinary people they offer only theurgy, which is dangerous magic. But Christian faith is accessible to all. The coming of Christ and the Church is revealed by the true God in divinely inspired scripture, and Christian worship unites the believer with the self-offering of Christ. Augustine is now ready to move to the second part of City of God, on the origin, course and due ends of the two cities—the city of God and the earthly city—which are intertwined in this world.

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.

This book provides a fascinating introduction to women's lives in the centuries when Christianity became the dominant religion. There are chapters on women and the law, medicine, and domestic life, and the author discusses some of the anicent, many still influential, theories about the nature of women. "Wonderfully rich in detail and example" - Daily Telegraph

Menna Elfyn's collection Murmur is full of murmurings - in English and Welsh - such as the need 'to walk the earth as if there's a baby sleeping next door'. Murmur is a poetry of meditation, from the reverberations of dead poets to murmurs of the heart which force the poet to dwell on the irregular beat of the poet's lot. Distant sounds too are heard from captivity in a sequence of poems about the last princess of Wales, Catrin Glyndwr, daughter of Owain Glyndwr, who was incarcerated with her children in the Tower of London for over two years until their mysterious death. Fittingly enough, "mur-mur" in Welsh also means "wall-wall", so the book's leitmotif is one that stresses the distance between words and worlds - and the way poetry is a language beyond language which we can sometimes only grasp through sound. 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. Murmur is her first new book since "Perfect Blemish: New & Selected Poems / Perffaith Nam: Dau Ddetholiad & Cherddi Newydd 1995-2007", and includes translations of poems by Welsh folk hero and poet of peace Waldo Williams (1901-71) which challenge the notion of the Celtic melancholy and testify to a 'hesitant hope'. Her own poems have facing English translations by leading Welsh poets: Elin ap Hywel, Joseph Clancy, Gillian Clarke, Damian Walford Davies and Paul Henry.

Augustine began City of God, De Civitate Dei, to answer complaints that Christians were to blame for the troubles of Rome and its empire because they would not sacrifice to the gods. In August 411 Alaric the Goth led barbarian warriors into the city. Refugees crossed to Africa, Augustine's homeland, where he was bishop of Hippo. This English-language commentary discusses Books 1-5, in which Augustine argued that Rome suffered worse disasters before Christianity was known; that empire depends on injustice; and that everything depends on the will of the true God, not on the many gods of Roman tradition. He had taught classical Latin literature and rhetoric, and used material and techniques which were familiar to educated Romans. He exploited authors they found authoritative: Sallust on Roman history, Cicero on Roman government, Virgil on Rome's imperial mission, the scholar Varro on Roman religious tradition. He discussed power and glory, pleasure and virtue; war and suicide, rape and celibacy; the purpose of suffering; fate and choice. He made a commitment to debate with philosophers on worshipping many gods for the sake of life after death, and to move from refuting false beliefs to expounding Christian teachings on the 'two cities'. The earthly city is the community of all who love themselves rather than God; the city of God is the community of all who love God rather than themselves. City of God took 22 books, which were influential-and often misunderstood-in later centuries.

"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.

Rarely did ancient authors write about the lives of women; even more rarely did they write about the lives of ordinary women: not queens or heroines who influenced war or politics, not sensational examples of virtue or vice, not Christian martyrs or ascetics, but women of moderate status, who experienced everyday joys and sorrows and had everyday merits and failings. Such a woman was Monica-now Saint Monica because of her relationship with her son Augustine, who wrote about her in the Confessions and elsewhere. Despite her rather unremarkable life, Saint Monica has inspired a robust controversy in academia, the Church, and the Augustine-reading public alike: some agree with Ambrose, bishop of Milan, who knew Monica, that Augustine was exceptionally blessed in having such a mother, while others think that Monica is a classic example of the manipulative mother who lives through her son, using religion to repress his sexual life and to control him even when he seems to escape. In Monica: An Ordinary Saint, Gillian Clark reconciles these competing images of Monica's life and legacy, arriving at a woman who was shrewd and enterprising, but also meek and gentle. Weighing Augustine's discussion of his mother against other evidence of women's lives in late antiquity, Clark achieves portraits both of Monica individually, and of the many women like her. Augustine did not claim that his mother was a saint, but he did think that the challenges of everyday life required courage and commitment to Christian principle. Monica's ordinary life, as both he and Clark tell it, showed both. Monica: An Ordinary Saint illuminates Monica, wife and mother, in the context of the societal expectations and burdens that shaped her and all ordinary women.

Augustine's 'Confessions', written at the close of the fourth century CE, is a highly significant text in the history of European culture. Augustine explains just how and why he came to abandon a successful career and the personal enjoyments of a largely secular existence to follow a life of prayer and study, leading to a true comprehension of God and the Bible. The avowed approach of this introductory book is to 'historicise' - to set Augustine's own experiences of religion, philosophy and Christian faith against the long-standing political, cultural and religious traditions of the classical world. Late antiquity saw the transformation of the classical heritage and its transmission by Christian authors. Augustine's ideas about how texts may be presented and read, how people respond to written and spoken language, find resonance in recent critical theory.The world in which Augustine lived, the structure, style and purpose of the Confessions, and the problems of rhetoric and truth posed by its author's personal search for himself are all scrutinised in this lucid introductory account. The volume also offers a useful guide to further reading.