In Wales in the company of The King of Britain's Daughter

I walked uphill on a muddy green track which might not quite take a small car.  Then it narrowed and became barely suitable for a pony.  I could just see roof timbers higher up.  It was very steep, and there was no sound but the sea, far below.  The green track led to a cottage which someone had begun to renovate.  But not recently.  It was unmistakably a little bereft, a little sad.  Beautiful slabs of stone fenced its tiny garden, and a mighty granite post marked the gate.  I put my hand on a delicate roughness of lichen so white it looked like a splash of paint, and stepped up, but with the odd feeling always present when you know your touch and step is the physical echo of so many others. 

I sat down on a big stone under the empty window of the cottage, looked out to sea and fished a book out of my pocket.  Just out of the wind, and for ten minutes, I enjoyed the company of Gillian Clark. 

Seal's head in water,
Bran's footprint in a slab of rock
Deep enough for a child to swim.
An ess of light as far as Ireland.
Salt in my mouth and the wind to lean on.

Later we climbed Yr Eifl's curving peak and looked down onto the Iron Age ruins of Tre'r Ceiri.

Beached for good on the high-tide line,
the houseboat leaned to sea,
at odds with the level earth
in its ballast of stones

and fishy drifts of sand.

Cargo of cuttlefish,

bladderwrack, blue mussels

the horn of a unicorn,

the skull of a curlew
and maps for the journey,

the King of Britain's daughter
making for open sea

past headlands like drinking dragons,

marked by that neolithic stone

from the giant's pocket.

All week we had stones, sea foam and radio.  We had slate caverns where they played ghostly recordings of Blaenau's male voice choirs, and bookshops in Caernarfon and Porthmadog where readers talked books with the bookseller and no-one had a loyalty card.

Making the Beds for the Dead

I've just noticed my copy of 'Making the Beds for the Dead' by Gillian Clark, is due back to the library tomorrow.  That's the excellent Scottish Poetry Library outpost in Dumfries.  I've already renewed it once, and might just ring up and see if I can keep it for another month.  Eleri Mills did the cover.

What a lovely collection.  Try this from 'The Physicians of Myddvai':

A crack in glass,
the scream and shadow
of a Hawk, close and low
enough to blow the heart.

There's something so sudden, so loud, so disorientating about this stanza. - and then that intimate body blow in the last line and a half.  I absolutely love it.  It reeks of the mysteries of the Mabinogion, though it's not such an old story.  The Physicians of Myddfai were a family of physicians who lived in the parish of Myddfai, Carmarthenshire. I did a bit of looking up.  They are thought to have been related to Rhiwallon Feddyg and his sons, Cadwgan, Gruffudd and Einion, who were physicians to Rhys Gryg, Lord of Dinefwr in the thirteenth century. It is believed that their descendants continued to practice as physicians in the area until the eighteenth century. The gravestones of the last physicians in the line, David Jones (who died in 1719) and John Jones (who died in 1739) are to be seen in the parish church of Myddfai today.

Gillian Clark writes very well about sheep.  I appreciate 'Wethers':

Spring-born, their lives lived
on the one slope, in the one flock.
Summer, they forget their mothers,
forget our hands, learn grass,
grow wild, wander afield on the hill.
Winter, they know us again, grow tame,
calling for hay at the gate.

True.