From “The Silence”, out this month (Carcanet). Born in Cardiff, Gillian Clarke was National Poet of Wales from 2008 to 2016. A Welsh translator, she edited the Anglo-Welsh Review from 1975 to 1984 and ran poetry workshops in schools and at Glamorgan university. She is president of Ty Newydd, the writers’ centre in North Wales which she co-founded in 1990. Her work has been translated into ten languages. She has a daughter and two sons, and lives with her architect husband on an eighteen-acre smallholding in Ceredigion,Wales, where they have planted 4,300 trees and care for the land according to conservation practice.