Zoology

Product Description

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 & 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 & 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 & peers & poems remembering victims of war & 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 & gold' is spotted one last time a silvering wind crossing a field two ears alert in a gap then gone'