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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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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Zoology (Paperback)
Gillian Clarke
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R307
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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'.
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.
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Christmas Wren (Paperback)
Gillian Clarke; Illustrated by Lotte Beatrix Crawford
1
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R183
R148
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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.
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Ice (Paperback)
Gillian Clarke
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R301
R279
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In "Ice" Gillian Clarke turns to the real winters of 2009 and 2010.
In their extremity they redefined all the seasons for her. Nature
asserted itself and renewed the environment for the imagination.
The poem "Polar" is the poet's point de repere, evoking a
polar-bear rug she had as a child and here resurrects in a spirit
of personal and ecological longing that becomes a creative act. She
lives with the planet, its seasons and creatures, in a joyful,
anxious communion. The book also includes the 'asked for' and
commissioned poems, and the "Guardian" spreads Clarke has written
during her time as National Poet of Wales (2008-2013). She follows
in the rich millennium-old Welsh tradition of occasional writing
going back to the first-known named British poets Aneirin and
Taliesin in the sixth century.
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All My Important Nothings (Paperback)
Maura Dooley; Contributions by Zaffar Kunial, Jack Underwood, Daljit Nagra, Paula Meehan, …
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R148
Discovery Miles 1 480
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"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.
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.
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Drabacus (Paperback)
Susan Ainsworth; Edited by Gillian Clarke; Illustrated by Grace Mills; Read by Alice Miller
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R298
Discovery Miles 2 980
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