Jane Routh reviews The Silence by Gillian Clarke (Carcanet, 2024)
As I start to write this, it is four years since the first Covid lockdown began. Four! Given the time it takes from manuscript to publication, we may soon see whole rafts of poems appearing about those locked-down lives. Gillian Clarke’s The Silence is one such – and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation too. Its cover blurb describes how, in listening to the silences of lockdown, Gillian Clarke finds “silence makes room for memory and for the company of the animal- and bird-life which surrounds us”.
Of course I’m aware that those of us living in rural areas had very different experiences of lockdown from those who lived in cities. The problems that panicked us out in the countryside were practical, especially about supplies, yet we had only to step outside to be in an ever more natural world without traffic on the lanes or contrails on blue sky. It will be interesting to see how urban poets, on the other hand, have dealt with the day-after-day sameness of lockdown.
Gillian Clarke has found the perfect structure to hold the tedium she experienced: in her poem sequence ‘The Hours’, she uses the canonical hours to name the repeating activities of those long days. The first three stanzas of ‘Sext’, show how easily she blends outdoors / domestic life / news of the virus:
Noon silence, and the sun is high.
The cattle drift away,
jigsaw pieces of black and white,
fragmented through trees.
Set the kettle singing. Lay the table.
Switch on the radio. Let the world
tramp over the innocent fields
wielding its bloody blade.
They are counting the dead
‘Terce’ is each day’s time for work at the computer: “All morning, two at the table, / tapping, tapping two worlds”, while ‘Compline’ experiences night as “a strange unknown of empty skies / and silent city streets” and a time to “remember the recent dead”. (These eight ‘hours’ poems, together with a final ‘Song’, celebrating the quietness, plus a different version of ‘Spring Equinox 2020’, were published as a pamphlet by Broken Sleep Books in 2021.)
These are poems of loving perception and gentle comment
The pattern of those lockdown days established, the book then moves from “this clean new silence” of ‘The Spring Equinox’ on through the seasons with poems of birds, flowers, trees, a fox, winds, heat, a hare …. These are poems of loving perception and gentle comment. ‘A fallen ash tree’ which “wrote on sky, scribbled / its arboreal calligraphy” becomes firewood, but where it had grown
half in, half out of the bank,
green shoots rise from the tomb,
draw nourishment out of the dark,
as if to be reborn.
Poems of memory flow from lockdown’s silence in the last third of the book, poems about the poet’s mother and then – with an interesting turn in ‘Gwenllian’ about why her own name is the Anglicised version of Gillian – she introduces a short sequence about the daughter of the last Prince of Wales who was “Locked fifty years / behind convent walls / in the flatlands of the Fens” to make sure she had no family. We move around more in these last poems, too – to Slovenia, to Offa’s Dyke, to Portmeirion, as well as to the beach where the poet remembers swimming as a child.
What struck me on my first quick fireside read-through was how many – apparently simple – beautifully apt phrases flow through these poems: “song-lines of passing birds”; “grain rippling / at the wind’s hand”; “mating hares / in love with the March wind”; a kite “flexing the fork of its tail and wings”; rain that “silvers the terrace stones / with rings”; “bats scrawl invisible ink on sky”. Open the book anywhere, and you’ll find a phrase to savour.
Open the book anywhere, and you’ll find a phrase to savour
Reading for pleasure, I tend to skim over oddities. Reading for a review is another matter. In this case, I puzzled over full-stops followed by lower case, and a comma beside a capital (both in ‘Flintstone’); over another poem ending with a comma, thinking I was missing something (I doubted myself rather than the author). ‘TH.ISTLE’ in a title had me check the contents list – yes, it shouldn’t have had that stop mid-word, and I can see a quotation mark missing in that list, too. (And things don’t get ‘pulished’ – the Acknowledgements needed a spell-check, too.)
Does this sort of thing matter? I think it does. It trips you up as you read. Punctuation exists to help the reader follow the sense. (I remember Kathleen Jamie saying she could agonise for hours over a comma.) But there’s another issue too: reading a poem is a matter of trust between writer and reader, and mistakes undermine that.
I noticed many recurring lines and phrases throughout the book. Here are a few examples. “Birds sing penillion” in ‘Sext’. In ‘What time is it’, “Birds sing their penillion” and the word pops up yet again on the facing page. This one’s noticeable, of course, as it’s in italics. Initially, I wrongly assumed “penillion” was a musical term as, unlike most of the other Welsh words in the text, it has no translation footnote. (I looked it up: Welsh for “stanzas”.)
‘Water talk’ and ‘Listening’ both open with the same line: “I’m listening to the rain”. That kite I mentioned above “flexes wings and the fork of its tail” (but the other way round) in another poem. In separate poems I noted strongly similar phrases: “she in the silence of the secret nest”, “she in silence in their secret nest”, “she in silence on her secret nest” – are these accidental repeats? Or deliberate echoes? I started to wonder about that dangerously powerful word “gold” – it occurs well over twenty times, so begins to sound diminished by over-use. I don’t have the same confidence in the text that I would if those typos and flaws of editing were not there.
Gillian Clarke’s voice remains unmistakably her own in The Silence to be enjoyed by her readers, though it deserves to be better served in publication than here
It was a pair of memory poems at the end of the book which first made me aware of so many repeating phrases: they share one of Gillian Clarke’s memorable images (“gorse popping in the heat” in the poem ‘Gorse’, then “air so hot the gorse was popping” in ‘Taking you there’). Both poems describe adults revisiting the site of the poet’s childhood memory of a “steep and stony” path and the ledge or rock “where [she] lay” after “nights of storm” or “a night of storms” with adults listening to the radio. Can the same memory with the same phrases work in two closely situated poems? I’m puzzled by the decision to include both.
At one time, publishers had desk editors and proof readers to iron out this sort of problem. Nevertheless, Gillian Clarke’s voice remains unmistakably her own in The Silence to be enjoyed by her readers, though it deserves to be better served in publication than here. I’m aware, though, that other readers may respond differently from me: in its Poetry Book Society Recommendation, it is described as a book “rich with repetition”.
Jane Routh has published four poetry collections and a prose book, Falling into Place (about rural north Lancashire) with Smith|Doorstop. Circumnavigation (2002) was shortlisted for the Forward prize for Best First Collection, Teach Yourself Mapmaking (2006) was a Poetry Book Society recommendation and she has won the Cardiff International and the Strokestown International Poetry Competitions. Jane Routh’s latest book is Listening to the Night (2018) and a new pamphlet, After, is available from Wayleave Press (2021).
