Gillian Clarke > Quotes

“There's a side to all writers that loves nothing better than a book, a big chair, a window.”
― Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year

“I want to follow him over the snows
between the immaculate earth and now,
between the silence and the shot that rang
over the ice at the top of the globe,
when the map of the earth was something we
knew by heart,
and they had not shot the bear,
had not loosed the ice,
had not, had not....”
― Gillian Clarke, Ice

“the hawthorns, drunk on syrups
that are richer by night
when spiders pitch
tents in the wet grass.”
― Gillian Clarke

“They are counting the dead.
They ask the old to die willingly.
Sign here, please. There will be
no mourners, no funeral.

Wind is our choir, owl our plainsong.
Birds sing our penillion.
Silence in the first spring leaves
is prayer, last rights and requiem.


- The Hours: Sext”
― Gillian Clarke, The Silence

“Something like hope begins,
as if times can turn, the world change course.
Maybe black-hearted boys in love with death
won't blow themselves and us to smithereens,

guns fall silent, the powerful cease
slaughtering the weak, the rich will not gorge
as the poor starve. Maybe good men
will again come to power, truth speak,
and words have meaning again.

- New Moon”
― Gillian Clarke, Zoology

“Grief howls in a suburban street, wild
as Demeter, who put the world to sleep,
a mother in perpetual winter weeps
for Persephone, her stolen child.”
― Gillian Clarke, Ice

“Take the great adventure
of living the difficult day.

- Home for Christmas”
― Gillian Clarke, Ice

“Poetry is a hook for memory”
― Gillian Clarke, At the Source: A Writer's Year