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Poem Of The Week: Snow By Gillian Clarke

Snow

We're brought to our senses, awake
to the black and whiteness of world.
Snow's sensational. It tastes
of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold.

Ball it between your palms
to throw at the moon. Relish its plushy creak.
Shake blossoms from chestnut and beech,
gather its laundered linen in your arms.

A twig of witch hazel from the ghost-garden
burns like myrrh in this room. Listen!
ice is whispering. Night darkens,
the mercury falls in the glass, glistening.

Motorways muffled in silence, lorries stranded
like dead birds, airports closed, trains trackless.
White paws lope the river on plates of ice
in the city's bewildered wilderness.

As the threat of snow hangs over forecasts like a febrile warning, promulgated by the tabloid press to create the illusion of meteorological catastrophe, it is well to be reminded of a world in which snowfall is benign, transformative, a seductive muse.

Welsh poet Gillian Clarke’s lovely, childlike poem of awakened sensation is a joy to behold: grabbing the immediacy of the experience like a snowball, the poet’s narrator encourages the reader to share her wonder, to relish the simple pleasure of witnessing a transfigured landscape. Directing her words to anyone who will listen, she is no less than astonished by the sensory enkindling:

‘Snow's sensational. It tastes
of ice and fire. Hold a handful of cold.’

In four loosely rhymed and half-rhymed quatrains, Clarke persuades us of the efficacy of the moment in a seam of metaphor-rich images that precisely describe the innocent, wide-eyed awe of being fully receptive to ones surroundings. The seamless covering of snow, its inducing of silence and obliteration of markers, is enjoined in a poem of celebration whose relishing of the facts of disruption is enhanced, no end, by Clarke’s use of sibilance and deliciously tortuous syntax: ‘the city’s bewildered wilderness’ skilfully captures the shock of the deluge and its potential to disorientate.

But there is comfort, even joy, in the newly-conferred freedom that snow may vouchsafe. Clarke’s anthropomorphic terrain – the snow and ice whisper and creak and burn in the twilight – augurs a renewed dynamism, a necessary resetting.

‘Snow’ is taken from Ice, published by Carcanet (2012), and is reproduced here with the kind permission of the publisher.

Gillian Clarke’s latest collection, The Silence, will be published by Carcanet in March. More information here

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