The national poet of Wales, Gillian Clarke, has spoken of how she writes, how often she writes, and the “transformational power” of poetry in a wide-ranging discussion with Radio 4’s Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs. In the programme she told how she wrote a poem about missing five-year-old April Jones “in minutes … it could not be resisted … none of us could think about anything else.”

She said she “obsessively” worked and wrote all the time, and talked about her usual method of composition. “I begin with the title. I tell the truth in my poems. I write factually. I often start with something like the weather. And then the real poem starts to happen, with any luck. But even very quick means lots of drafts.” 

Clarke, whose verse has been translated into 10 languages, talked about her poem ‘Miracle on St David’s Day’,  which was about “the transformational power of poetry”. On a visit to a psychiatric hospital, a patient with depression who had never been known to speak suddenly stood up and began to recite Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’, afterwards managing to add that he had “always loved poetry”. 

How did she become a poet? An aunt took her to hear Shakespeare in Stratford at the age of 10: “It changed my life … it was a prompt to become a poet.” When a teacher said she could become a writer, “that lit a fire in my heart”. And then her first husband retrieved a poem she had tossed in the wastepaper basket, ironed it and sent if off to Poetry Wales. It was her first poem to be published.

Among the recordings she chose for the programme were Leonard Cohen – “completely wonderful, utterly charming”- singing ‘Suzanne’, and Seamus Heaney reading The Blackbird at Glanmore:   “His death was such a shock … but in a sense a poet never dies”. 

You can listen to the whole programme here