Gillian Clarke's reading was wonderful - we have some CDs of her reading her work in case anyone would like a permanent reminder of how well she reads (the recording was not made at our talk so is not exclusively about washing). She began with tribute to the four miners who had just been found, reading an earlier poem in memory of another accident -Six Bells - 28th June 1960
Perhaps a woman hanging out the wash
paused, hearing something, a sudden hush,
a pulse inside the earth like a blow to the heart,
holding in her arms the wet weight
of her wedding sheets, his shirts. Perhaps
heads lifted from the work of scrubbing steps,
hands stilled from wringing rainbows onto slate,
while below the town, deep in the pit
a rock-fall struck a spark from steel, and fired
the void, punched through the mine a fist
of blazing firedamp. As they died,
perhaps a silence, before sirens cried,
before the people gathered in the street,
before she'd finished hanging out her sheets.
She read a lot from Washing Lines, and from her own work. A treat was to hear unpublished, recent poems, including one just completed that day. She also read Shirt of a Lad, an anonymous poem translated by Tony Conran, which will surely be in a future edition of Washing Lines.
