Five Fields

Clarke Gillian

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.

About the Author

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. Clarke was the inaugural Capital Poet for Cardiff 2005-6. 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 appointed National Poet of Wales in 2008 until 2016.

Reviews

"Gillian Clarke's poems ring with lucidity and power... her work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical" – Times Literary Supplement

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