Clay Hill

Clay Hill appeared in 1988 from Poetry Wales Press. Strongly edited by Cary Archard, the book was acclaimed by a wide range of reviewers. 'All the murkiness of a Chapequidick and the mystery of a biblical fable' Book News from Wales 'Liardet's poems are as substantial, as polished and as carefully packed as Victorian tallboys' Christopher Meredith 'Tim Liardet is a real discovery. Clay Hill is one of the best firstcollections from a welsh publisher in years.....there is a secure mastery of the poetry line and a concern for language that is constantly rewarding....a poet of real achievement and exciting potential' Tony Curtis

Summer Storm

1

The pressure quadruples. Insects beneath it
Crawl under each leaf. The guttering's spider
Wobbles its rigging. Old and immense
The sycamores gather - all stillness and resignation -
The shallows of their gloom upon which
The Toby Jugs squander a puffed glance
Creep indoors. No Lights. The dark garden's
Abandoned mowing maroons its ragged island
As the clock beats strong, against the Approach.

The fields are sensuous, rank with odours.
Out of the distance - suddenly overhead -
The firmamental boulders are being
Tipped, disgruntled, grumbling round.
One electrical suture splices down.
The first hesitant drops plip on the glass
Like the moths, their inearthly eye-lights
Blundering against a curtailed obstruction.
One ungainly duck flaps panicking up
Across the gloom caught in sudden daylight.
The trough bubbles. Each leaf begins to bounce.

2

My tongue found your wetness at last.
Spread wide, breasts lapsing back, eyes shut
And head to one side - hair spread on a surface
As if on water, as if perfectly weightless -
You lay above, warm feathers settling round you.
All lights gone, whatever remained of the storm
Moved around us and the open-curtained room
In which we moved together almost eerily
By its eerie light, your feet in the air
And toes straining up, to fetch our noises
From their sumberged-places through our scorched throats.
The broken-hedged fields of flattened hay
Out under the sycamores flashed in the last
Innocuous spasms, framed by the window,
Shadowing the tensed vertebrae along my spine.
Belly to belly, moisture into moisture.

Under Upper Tier

To avoid the glazed queues at Tea
I trouble the row between Overs,
To assuage fermenting discomfort,
the gaseous contents of the can...
Cracked tiles, shall we say, map relief.

A gloom behind the sunlit field.
As sudden as the jets that flush
Away, in the stand above, the roar
Of ruptured concentration, a span
Underneath clattering with fresh claps.

And I know that someone (walking back
Feeling perhaps the ghost of the ghost
Of the dead thud on the pad) is out.
His mood, checked for cameras, matches
My single overwhelmed expletive.

He walks from sunlight to the gloom.
I walk from the gloom to sunlight.
A ball blurred. Above me consensus
Gathers like the amplified sound
Of rainfall. Grass warms. Cisterns hiss.