Motherhood
The theme of motherhood appears in a variety of Clarke's poems, and she relates the experience to both domesticity and creativity. Tension between allowing a child agency and holding fiercely to a sense of unity and protection is particularly salient in the poem "Catrin." Written for the poet's daughter, "Catrin" exhibits the dual sense of conflict and love through the image of a cord connecting the speaker and her daughter. During birth, the umbilical cord is a "Red rope of love which we both / Fought over" (8-9). The speaker recounts the birth as a struggle "To be two, to be ourselves" (17). Here, the process of individuation is physical, whereas later it becomes psychological. The connection transforms from the umbilical cord into "that old rope" stemming from the speaker's heart, "Trailing love and conflict" (25 and 27). The love this speaker has for her child simultaneously expands and tightens about her life.
Motherhood is portrayed in a more serene way in the poem "Musician," which is dedicated to Clarke's eldest son Owain. In the poem, Owain remains so engrossed in playing the piano that he does not sleep. Rather than fight with him over his messy room and lack of a regular sleep schedule, the speaker allows her son to pursue his calling into the early hours of the morning. Not only this, but she actively enjoys hearing Owain play the piano in conjunction with the heavy snowfall. The music and the snow combine to create a sacred experience.
The different atmospheres and levels of tension in these two poems demonstrate how motherhood is a multifaceted experience.
Memory
Clarke's speakers often recall an important event or detail from the past that holds weight in the present moment. For example, the opening line of "Catrin" reads, "I can remember you, child." The speaker remembers and reimagines the day of Catrin's birth in an intensely vivid way. She describes how she "wrote / All over the walls with [her] / Words, coloured the clean squares / With the wild, tender circles" (11-14). Here, colors and shapes convey different facets of the speaker's memory.
In "Neighbours" and "Musician," the speaker recalls a particular season using the demonstrative pronoun "that." The poem "Neighbours" begins with the statement "That spring was late." This seemingly harmless statement begins to take on an ominous quality by the end of the first stanza. In comparison, "That bitterest winter" in "Musician" eventually settles into a serene (though still intensely cold) and musical atmosphere (5).
Layered Chronologies
Clarke often writes about significant moments in both the present and past, and at times she zooms out to examine historical instances beyond the scope of personal memory. In "Lunchtime Lecture," Clarke layers these different chronologies when the speaker imagines a Stone Age woman as a living, breathing human rather than simply skeletal remains. The speaker, who is still in what she calls the "season" of the living, visualizes the long-dead woman as "Fleshed, with woman's hair and colours" (23 and 24). They stare at each other across the dark sea of time. This layering effect gestures toward the ephemerality of human existence and creates a more fluid sense of time.
Nature, Industry, and Pollution
The meeting place between nature and human industry is fraught with complications in Clarke's poetry. She blurs the distinctions between what is natural and what is manufactured or artificial, particularly in the poem "Heron at Port Talbot." The speaker characterizes the Port Talbot Steelworks as having bones, which are a type of living tissue or evidence of past life. This construes the steel mill as a living (or most likely a once-living) being.
The harmful consequences of pollution appear in many of Clarke's poems, including "Heron at Port Talbot" and "Neighbours." In "Heron 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" (17-20). Sulphur emissions from steelmaking can damage environments and waterways as well as negatively impact health. The term "dirty laundry" insinuates a harmful secret exposed in public, and here, pollution is humanity's dirty open secret.
Pollution is more like a delayed secret unleashed over Europe in the poem "Neighbours." Despite the imminent danger, it took days for reports to be released (by Sweden, not the USSR) and for evacuations to begin after the explosion at Chernobyl. The speaker characterizes nuclear fallout as "bitter air," "caesium," "[poison]," and "the virus and the toxin" (11, 13, 15, and 19).
Encountering Other Beings in the Natural World
Clarke's human speakers often encounter other animals in the natural world. This generates a dignified portrayal of the animal, as well as revelations about life in general. In "Heron at Port Talbot," the speaker nearly crashes into a flying heron as she drives on the highway beside the Port Talbot Steelworks. The "shocking / intimacy of near-collision" leads the speaker to reflect on the collision of nature and human industry (10-11). She portrays the heron as a "surveyor" and an "archangel" opening up sky routes for his kind (23 and 26). The speaker also imagines this encounter as reciprocal in that both she and the heron are affected. This is seen in the lines "broken rhythms of blood," with the plural "rhythms" referring to the speaker and the bird (31).
Encounters with birds take on a sinister quality in the poem "Neighbours" due to the unintended consequences of the blast at Chernobyl. In the poem, nuclear fallout poisons different species that live and fly through the affected areas. Because officials failed to contain the radiation, the extent of damage reached environments in neighboring countries. Children are warned of the fallen birds' "dangerous beauty," and they themselves are later poisoned (8).
Awe
Scholars have written about Clarke's humane and expansive poetic vision, which often includes the experience of awe. Whether in relation to motherhood, nature, or life in general, Clarke's speakers express awe using figurative language. For example, the "Red rope of love" in the poem "Catrin" is a metaphor that signifies both an umbilical cord and the bond created between the speaker and her daughter (8). The speaker finds this "old rope" to be both constricting and expansive: a mixture of fear, conflict, and fierce love (25).
Clarke zooms out from the small-scale and ordinary details of the speaker's life in "Lunchtime Lecture" to reach across the wide expanse of time. The speaker imagines a long-dead woman as she must have been in life. This leads to a feeling of connection as well as to a reflection on the ephemerality of human life.
Music
In an interview, Clarke defines poetry as "word music that gathers something into a very colorful phrase which has reverberations." She creates this "word music" through alliteration, assonance, and other lyrical language that emphasizes beauty, rhythm, and emotional expression. Music as a direct subject appears in the poem "Musician," which Clarke wrote for her eldest son. Over the course of a bitterly cold winter, the sound of her son Owain's piano-playing mingles with the heavy snowfall to evoke a holy experience in the speaker. She dreams of her house "vaulted and pillared with snow, / a drowned cathedral," and she wakes "to hear the piano's muffled bells" (19 and 21). Auditory imagery mingles sight and sound to recreate the experience of hearing Owain play the piano in a house surrounded by snow.
