Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the writer Gillian Clark.

Wales's national poet three years ago she received the Queen's gold medal for her work. She writes about

everything from dinosaurs to suicide, but the potency and power of nature is a

recurring motif. Although she's recognized for her significant and distinguished contribution to her

homeland's literature and culture, her verse has been translated into ten languages, and she

regularly receives fan mail from South America, Pakistan and most countries in between.

Aside from writing, her main project in life is the conservation of her own small patch of

West Wales, restoring hedges, conserving bluebells and tending sheep take up her

spare time. She says, A poem is the only work of art you can have for nothing.

Read it, memorize it, copy it into your notebook, and it's

yours. Now I wonder, Julian Clark, when you got that call offering you the post of National Poet of Wales,

how did you react? Were you daunted? I said no.

Did you? I was in Southampton doing poetry live and I said no no no no I don't think it's a good idea I don't want to sit around being

famous I've got work to do and by the end of a few hours my fenno poets who were all in the green room in Southampton said yes you have to do it you

have to do it and my son said mum you must do it ma'am that's what they call me you do it. But if I was going to do it at all I was going to do it for Wales I was going to do it for poetry I was going to do it for all the kids that I know who that I know need poetry and human beings need this language in their lives and I was

going to do it with a passion.

Since you were appointed, you've written among many other poems, attributes to the Cardiff

branch of a very well-known

department store you've written a very moving poem called Daughter.

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