AKALA:'We spend all our lives remembering things. From the first faces we ever saw, to the music we woke up to this morning.' And these moments are stored up here as memories. And these memories make up a kind of story. The story of our lives. 'But what have you actually remembered? How do you know if your story is true?'
GILLIAN CLARKE:'Cold Knap Lake is a real place and is in a park in Barry in South Wales and our house was just right beside it.'
AKALA:And this incident that your recording is it autobiographical or is it imagined.
GILLIAN CLARKE:No, it's not imagined I was remembering a powerful experience when I was five years old. A man knocking on the door saying "come quickly a child has drowned" and tangled up with my memory of what really did happen
GILLIAN CLARKE:is also the stories about white birds carrying children away, 'swans on the water and all the kind of magic that is associated with all the fairy stories. We once watched a crowd pull a drowned child from the lake. Blue lipped and dressed in water's long green silk she lay for dead.' Then kneeling on the earth, her red head bowed
GILLIAN CLARKE:her war time cotton frock soaked
GILLIAN CLARKE:my mother gave a stranger's child her breath. 'The crowd stood silent,' drawn by the dread of it.
YOUNG DEACON:Blue lipped the child is close to death
YOUNG DEACON:but the redheaded lady comes, breathes life–
SOPHIA THAKUR:The way it symbolises like blood and life as well
YOUNG DEACON:It's the opposites of life and death reflected in colour.
GILLIAN CLARKE:What I wanted to say in that little bit when my mother appears She's leaning by this child and I don't understand what's happening I'm about five years old and I can see she's breathing into the child and so it's me, age five remembers it as my mother gave a stranger's child her breath in fact it's the kiss of life. The word heroine tells you I'm proud
GILLIAN CLARKE:and I knew my mother could kiss anyone better because that's what mothers do. 'The child breathed, bleating and rosy in my mother's hands.' My father took her home to a poor house
GILLIAN CLARKE:and watched her thrashed for almost drowning
GILLIAN CLARKE:Was I there?
GILLIAN CLARKE:'Or is that troubled surface something else shadowy under the dipped fingers of willows where satiny mud blooms in cloudiness' after the treading, heavy webs of swans as their wings beat and whistle on the air.
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:Did you pick up on the change in language? The very distinct change
ANTHONY ANAXAGOROU:where at the beginning up until the point where she goes home, it's very almost prosaic like it's like a narrative, it's telling you a story. And then it becomes this really kind of broad, eloquent, rich poeticness that kind of takes over.
GILLIAN CLARKE:Any poem that's any good, I think, will not be shaped and formed exactly and precisely and the perfect rhyme and exactly the right number of syllables and all, that's not how it works. You say, "do I love it?", and if you love it you go with it.
AKALA:I agree.
GILLIAN CLARKE:Poetry is word music and it isn't poetry otherwise. There is a very special tradition in the Welsh language and it's called cynghanedd and it's about using the pattern of consonants
GILLIAN CLARKE:in one word matching the words in the next word exactly but at a different rhythm. So like, say, blood ballad b, l, d, b, l, d, but they're a different rhythm. So I am instinctively doing a lot of that in everything I write. I'm sure of that. All lost things lie under closing water
GILLIAN CLARKE:in that lake, with the poor man's daughter. Daughter and water which I think, for me personally, is one of the loveliest rhymes in the world
GILLIAN CLARKE:because it combines two such wonderful things but, it doesn't look like a rhyme.
AKALA:Yeah, that's true.
GILLIAN CLARKE:Daughter should rhyme with laughter, water should rhyme with after
AKALA:Yeah.
GILLIAN CLARKE:But it doesn't, they rhyme in this wonderful, eccentric way,
AKALA:Yeah.
GILLIAN CLARKE:that makes it even more fun. The other thing about the end of the poem is everything is lost, all lost things lie under closing water and the water closes because it's just fallen in.
AKALA:That's a beautiful image as well, closing water.
GILLIAN CLARKE:So the lake remembers, as places do and you remember so a whole place is full of my childhood and there's no richer place to look for poems, than your childhood.
AKALA:'Can we ever know exactly what happened at Cold Knap Lake?' Gillian Clarke shows us just how difficult that is but she also proves that great poetry, along with our imagination can recapture a memory.
Hip-hop star Akala meets the poet Gillian Clarke to explore the themes and imagery of her poem 'Cold Knap Lake'.
They discuss how a childhood memory of a child drowning inspired the poem, while questioning the ability of our memories to re-tell the truth.
Young poets also help Akala breakdown the language and meaning of the poem, from the perspectives of young people actively engaged in language.
This clip is from the series Poetry: Between the Lines.
Teacher Notes
_Teacher viewing recommended prior to use in the classroom
This could be used to explore the theme of Place in poetry, and to teach analysis of poetic technique and form.
Students can be encouraged to become fluent with critical terminology and language, and develop their own interpretations of poems they have read.
It could also be useful in highlighting context and biography in literature, especially to illustrate the poetic work of Gillian Clarke.
Students can explore and develop their own taste in poetry, and share their discoveries with the class.
Curriculum Notes
This clip will be relevant for teaching English Literature.
This topic appears in OCR, Edexcel, AQA, WJEC KS4/GCSE in England and Wales, CCEA GCSE in Northern Ireland and SQA National 4/5 in Scotland.