At the Source reflects upon a writer’s deep inheritance of language, myth and nature. Her creative journeys begin from those sources. The book opens with a house, Blaen Cwrt. A river rises, a tributary which will flow on to the Atlantic, and a family has its roots there. There the Welsh poet Gillian Clarke writes in what was the byre, looking across a landscape worked and imagined by generations of farmers and poets.
Six chapters explore the relationship of places and languages, culture and family, geology and myth, in a poet’s imagination. At the heart of the book is a journal of the writer’s year. Lyrical, wise, meticulously observant, often humorous, Clarke records the experience of living and working on the land, observing the world from a particular place, the continuity and remaking of the source.

Cover drawing copyright Mirlo Cai Cardenas. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist. Cover design StephenRaw.com

'Gillian Clarke's outer and inner landscapes are the sources from which her poetry draws its strengths.' - Carol Ann Duffy, Guardian. 'Gillian Clarke's [poems] ring with lucidity and power...Clarke's work is both personal and archetypal, built out of language as concrete as it is musical.' - Anne Stevenson, Times Literary Supplement.

Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke is a poet, playwright, editor, broadcaster, lecturer and translator (from Welsh). She edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984, and has taught creative writing in primary and secondary schools and at university level. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers' centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Since 1994 she has been a tutor in Creative Writing at the University of Glamorgan. Her poetry is studied by GCSE and A Level students throughout Britain. She has given poetry readings and lectures in Europe and the United States, and her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and now lives with her architect husband on a smallholding in Ceredigion, Wales, where they raise a small flock of sheep, and care for the land according to organic and conservation practice. Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales 2008 - 2015. Carcanet has published her Selected Poems (1985), Letting in the Rumour (1989, Poetry Book Society Recommendation), The King of Britain's Daughter (1993), Collected Poems (1997), Five Fields (1998) and Making the Beds for the Dead (2004). Listen to Gillian in conversation with Nadia Kingsley on the Fair Acre Press DIVERSIFLY podcastabout her writing process, what poetry is, and the Welsh language.