$14.99

180 Pages
©2008
Lives and Letters (Carcanet)

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At the Source reflects upon a writer’s deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets. 

Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet’s imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer’s year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.

Gillian Clarke’s outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths.—Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian

Gillian Clarke’s [poems] ring with lucidity and power... Clarke’s work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.—Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement