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Megalithic Poems
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moss
moss
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Re: Gillian Clarke: Stone
Mar 06, 2017, 21:13
Rhiannon wrote:
She was on Jeremy Paxman's programme last night talking about the embryonic Severn... I'm guessing you saw her?! It was a nice programme.


Well I must have found the poem in 2012, she is writing about Pentre Ifan, and says...

"What set me on this stony path was working on a commission to write about a megalith which I’ve known all my life, since early childhood days spent in Pembrokeshire with my grandmother on the farm. The megalith is a massive but elegant cromlech known as Pentre Ifan, in the hills above the Irish Sea. The huge weight of the capstone seems scarcely to touch the orthostats. Within sight of the sea, under the granite outcrop of Carn Meini - source of the bluestones of Stonehenge - Pentre Ifan is a pictogram from the alphabet of stone. I read its silhouette as the very word for cromlech. Carn Meini is formed from igneous granite, as old and as hard as any rock on the planet, an outburst of molten dolerite and rhyolite from the Earth’s mantle. Under Carn Meini the fields slip downhill to the sea, the underlying sedimentary rock blown away in the wind, aeon by aeon, from Carn Meini’s bony shoulders."

Apparently the poem must have been in a book called "Megalith: Eleven Journeys in Search of Stones". Can't remember reading it though.
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Re: Gillian Clarke: Stone (Rhiannon)		 Replies:
Re: Gillian Clarke: Stone (carol27)
Re: Gillian Clarke: Stone (Littlestone)
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