Overview
Included in this collection are the poet Gillian Clarke's personal verses and stories from farmers in her family, her neighborhood, and Wales. There is an instinctive and deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book, and its open structure naturally allows for the incorporation of her seven rock poems, written for the national Botanic Garden of Wales, as well as those based on archaeology, war, and urban violence. The collection's title sequence charts the journey of a virus in the "plague year," which comes from outer space and travels on a fox's paw, on the beak of a kite, on a crow, and on a buzzard.Author Biography
Gillian Clarke is the author of Five Fields, Gillian Clarke Collected Poems, and Gillian Clarke Selected Poems. A broadcaster, freelance writer, and lecturer, she was an editor of the Anglo-Welsh Review and has been teaching creative writing in primary and secondary schools.