Making the Beds for the Dead

Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has taught creative writing in primary and secondary schools and at university level. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Since 1994 she has been a tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and now lives with her architect husband on a smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they raise a small flock of sheep, and care for the land according to organic and conservation practice.Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008 - 2015.Carcanet has published her Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The King of Britain's Daughter (1993), Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998) and Making the Beds for the Dead (2004).Listen to Gillian in conversation with Nadia Kingsley on the Fair Acre Press DIVERSIFLY podcastabout her writing process, what poetry is, and the Welsh language.

Reviewed in Planet by Anne CluysenaarThis is a richly varied collection, remarkable both for its sense of vast perspectives within immediate (often homely) experience and its visceral evocation of current events.The role of art in our lives is another recurring theme, from the first poem, remembering the childhood impact of words and images in a Holy Bible, to the last, which imagines that, after some planetary flood (floods haunt this collection), the first colour to return "will be gold / one dip from Bellini's brush, / Cinquecento nativities..."