I can remember you, our first
Fierce confrontation, the tight
Red rope of love which we both
Fought over.
The speaker reiterates her memory of the day her daughter was born. From the beginning, the speaker experiences motherhood as a source of both conflict and love. Although becoming a mother expands the speaker's capacity to love, she also feels constricted. This feeling of tightness could be the speaker's fear that her daughter will be harmed out in the world, but it also relates to the process of individuation.
The "Red rope of love" physically refers to the umbilical cord and symbolizes the intense bond between the speaker and Catrin (8).
...I wrote
All over the walls with my
Words, coloured the clean squares
With the wild, tender circles
Of our struggle to become
Separate. We want, we shouted,
To be two, to be ourselves.
In this quote, Clarke uses figurative and musical language to describe the moment of birth. She relies on auditory imagery to appeal to the reader's senses of sound and visualization, showing the way that music is an essential part of Clarke's poetics. The alliteration of the /w/ contributes to this line's musicality. The caesuras in these lines emphasize the process of individuation occurring between the speaker and Catrin.
She's a tree in winter, stripped white on a black sky,
Leafless formality, brow, bough in fine relief.
I, at some other season, illustrate the tree
Fleshed, with woman's hair and colours...
In this quote, the speaker uses a metaphor that depicts the long-dead woman as a tree. Clarke layers different chronologies in this poem; the speaker uses her imagination to reach across the vast expanse of time to imagine the Stone Age woman as she was in life. The natural imagery in this quote characterizes humans as inseparable from nature, and also conveys the speaker's intimate feeling of connection to this woman. The word "illustrate" shows the speaker's active imagination.
We stare at each other, dark into sightless
Dark, seeing only ourselves in the black pools,
Gulping the risen sea that booms in the shell.
The speaker grants the skull of a long-dead woman agency by imagining her as alive and capable of looking back. These lines impart the speaker's sense of awe as she connects with someone over the separation of several millennia. In Clarke's ambitious and slightly abstract metaphor, she compares the vast expanse of time with dark water, and then uses this to fluidly layer different chronologies. In addition, the words "gulping" and "booms" are examples of onomatopoeia. To gulp is to swallow quickly or in large mouthfuls, and here it could convey the human desire to live as intensely as possible in the short amount of time available.
Wing-beats failed over fjords, each lung a sip of gall.
Children were warned of their dangerous beauty.
During their annual migratory routes in 1986, several species of birds were among the thousands of species that fell victim to the aftereffects of the disastrous explosion at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. The fricative alliteration in "failed over fjords" gives an airy and breathless feel, echoing the failing flight of these birds. Although Clarke's poems often portray encounters between humans and other natural beings, here the possible encounter is fraught with danger. The birds—flying through skies contaminated by nuclear fallout—eventually die from radiation exposure. The term "sip of gall" is a biblical allusion to bitterness.
We watch for bird migrations,
one bird returning with green in its voice,
glasnost. golau glas. a first break of blue.
The speaker functions as a plural "we" in "Neighbours," showing the unity between different Europeans after the disastrous explosion at Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Despite the birds that died in the previous year after the blast, the speaker ends the poem on a hopeful note as everyone waits for the birds to return. The color green symbolizes the hope for regrowth, and the color blue represents clear skies free of residual radioactive material. The term "glasnost" is a Russian word meaning "openness." It refers to the policy or practice of more open consultative government and wider dissemination of information, initiated by leader Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985. The term "golau glas" is Welsh for "blue light," and it sonically resembles "glasnost" through alliteration. Semantically, the Welsh "golau glas" relates to the final English phrase "a first break of blue."
Then we almost touch, both braking flight,
bank on the air and feel that shocking
intimacy of near-collision,
animal tracks that cross in snow.
Despite the urgency of this moment, the speaker's perception slows down to notice minute details and to frame the encounter as "intima[te]." The plosive /b/ alliteration adds emphasis and meaning. The unexpected intimacy of the situation is one example of how Clarke's speakers often encounter other beings in the natural world. In the poem, this encounter comments on the collision between nature and industry at Port Talbot.
The steel town’s sulphurs billow
like dirty washing. The sky stains
with steely inks and fires, chemical
rustings, salt-grains, sand under snow.
Here, Clarke metaphorically compares the steel mill's pollution to dirty laundry. To air dirty laundry is an idiom that means to share private affairs that the subject does not want to be made public. In this case, the mill's pollution is an open dirty secret because its evidence is written in the sky for everyone to see. Snow temporarily obscures the other polluting outputs of steelmaking.
I slept under two duvets and my grandmother’s fur,
and woke, suffocating, in the luminous nights
to hear the Hungarian Dances across moonlit snow.
A duvet is made from cloth sewn to form a large bag, then filled with goose down or other soft materials. That the speaker sleeps beneath two duvets and her grandmother's fur demonstrates how bitterly cold this winter is. However cold it is outside, however, the speaker's house seems to have a comfortable and cozy atmosphere. To sleep beneath one's grandmother's fur not only provides natural warmth, but also a sense of family connection. The description "luminous night" conveys the speaker's quiet awe as she witnesses the midnight snowfall accompanied by the sound of her son playing the piano.
I dreamed the house vaulted and pillared with snow,
a drowned cathedral, waiting for the thaw,
and woke to hear the piano’s muffled bells,
a first pianissimo slip of snow from the roof.
The sound of Owain (the speaker's son) playing piano blends with the heavy snowfall through Clarke's use of auditory imagery. The liquid /l/ alliteration in "muffled bells" and sibilance in "first pianissimo slip of snow" contribute to the poem's musical quality. Not only does the poem sound musical, but it also thematically concerns music. The speaker experiences quiet awe as she goes to sleep, dreams of, and wakes to the sound of Owain playing piano.
