This review is taken from PN Review 126, Volume 25 Number 4, March - April 1999.
on Gillian Clarke, Andrew Motion and John Agard
John Agard, From the Devil's Pulpit (Bloodaxe) £
John Fuller, Amy Clampitt, Gillian Clarke, Vasko Popa, R.F. Langley, Kathleen Raine, Séan Rafferty, Pearse Hutchinson, Michael Hartnett, Richard Kell, R.F. Langley, John Montague, Sally Purcell, Robert Nye, Freda Downie, Drummond Allison, Lee Harwood, David Constantine, Edward Lowbury, Anthony Cronin, Edith Sitwell, C.K. Williams, Thom Gunn, Weldon Kees, P.J. Kavanagh, Norman MacCaig, Paul Auster, John Welch, Christopher Middleton, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Donald Davie, Miriam Waddington, Ciaran Carson, Elizabeth Jennings, A.S.J. Tessimond, Norman MacCaig, Charles Tomlinson, Michael Hamburger, Michael Donaghy, Sheila Wingfield, Alan Brownjohn, Peter Porter, Edith Sitwell, Ronald Duncan, W.S. Graham, Michael Murphy, Kathleen Raine, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Anne Stevenson, Montagu Slater, Ian Patterson, Collected Poems (Carcanet) £
John Ennis, Heinrich Heine, Salvador Espriu, Charles Tomlinson, Peter Bland, Carole Satyamurti, Andrew Motion, Michael Longley, David Scott, Michael Longley, John Riley, Mark Strand, Denise Riley, John Montague, Clive Wilmer, Matthew Sweeney, Peter Abbs, George MacBeth, W.S. Graham, Francis Ponge, Douglas Clark, David Gascoyne, Christine Evans, Derek Mahon, Frederick Seidel, Geoff Page, Thomas Kinsella, Michael Hofmann, Ruth Bidgood, Kirkpatrick Dobie, Vicki Raymond, David Malouf, E.J. Scovell, Jean Garrigue, Fleur Adcock, Kenneth Koch, Bernard O'Donoghue, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, James Schuyler, Lee Harwood, David Wright, Vivian Smith, Kathleen Raine, Hugo Williams, David Harsent, Michael Hamburger, Mark O'Connor, Les A. Murray, Charles Johnston, Fleur Adcock, Philip Levine, Galway Kinnell, Michael Riviere, Lawrence Lerner, Thomas Blackburn, D.M. Thomas, Fleur Adcock, John Montague, P.J. Kavanagh, David Holbrook, John Silkin, Günter Grass, Elizabeth Jennings, Patricia Beer, Peter Sansom, Jaan Kaplinski, Vladimir Khodasevich, Jack Clemo, Frank Koenegracht, Jamie McKendrick, Michael Symmons Roberts, Jean Bleakney, William Plomer, Colette Bryce, Kathleen Jamie, Selected Poems (Faber &
Gillian Clarke was one of three judges for the 1983 National Poetry competition which I, aged fifteen, entered for the first time. A young Scottish poet called Carol Ann Duffy won and I didn't. It came as a daunting surprise, then, to be reviewing Clarke's Collected Poems. It came as an even greater surprise to open the book randomly at a poem called 'Post Script After judging the poetry competition':
Each page committed. Your last poems burn.
Out with the cliché, archaism, weed.
They drift the hill and my mind's clear again.
New year and a fired language is what we need.
Apart from the personal pain of imagining one's own juvenalia being burned with hedge-clippings, 'Post Script' is a good idea well executed, and a good introduction to Clarke's work. The image of fire has been a recurring and key motif throughout her career. It has allowed the poet to deal with the domestic on one hand, and on the other with such core ideas as cleansing and rebirth. It is indicative that Clarke has purged her output of its weaker moments: Collected Poems is really a generous selection. She has remained a poet with a definite sense of her own work and of what poetry in general should aspire to.
The poems of Clarke's first two collections, The Sundial and Letter from a Far Country, show a poet with a strong feeling for Welsh national identity ...
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