Nature plays an integral role in Clarke's poetry, and she primarily focuses on the Welsh landscape because of her own Welsh ancestral roots. Originally born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke currently lives with her family on an organic smallholding in Ceredigion, a county in the west of Wales. A smallholding is an agricultural holding smaller than a farm. When her children were young, Clarke and her architect husband bought and renovated an old, ruined smallholding called Blaen Cwrt in Talgarreg, south Ceredigion. In her poem "Blaen Cwrt," she describes the house and her life there, ending with the lines, "Two rooms, waking and sleeping, / Two languages, two centuries of past / To ponder on, and the basic need / To work hard in order to survive" (Lines 29-32). This rural lifestyle inspires a great deal of Clarke's natural imagery as well as the respectful and reciprocal way in which her speakers interact with other beings in the natural world.
Although the Welsh landscape is the primary setting in Clarke's poems, she also writes about events happening in other places. In a video made by the Welsh government, she states, "I'm very aware of the world beyond this beautiful quiet place. I hear about things happening, catastrophes in many places. Those sort of things, it gets language going in my head."
