The Silence by Gillian Clarke
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION SPRING 2024 Penny Boxall sober act of keeping faith

sober act of keeping faith with the ethical force of exact expression

generous with its thinking and observations

As Audre Lorde writes ‘We survived and survival breeds desire for more self’

It is the life of an immigrant who has been in this country for fifty-odd years

The Silence by Gillian Clarke<br><b>POETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION SPRING 2024</b> Penny Boxall sober act of keeping faith'The days have no names. The day they count the dead,the day they closed the doors,turned off the lights. We're still here in the silence,hearing tree talk,the wind's secrets,the company of birds.' 'The Year of the Dead' The poems in Gillian Clarke's The Silence begin during lockdown, whose silences Clarke listens so attentively that other voices emerge. As the book progresses, that silence deepens, in the poems about her mother and childhood, about