The Hours

The Hours is a pamphlet by Gillian Clarke written in and through the first months of the Covid-19 pandemic, using the Welsh countryside and the canonical hours of St Benedict's rule as twin frameworks for measuring time when ordinary time has ceased to function. The opening sequence moves through March, April, and May of 2020, tracking the pandemic's arrival and the strange double condition it produced: grief for the dead counted daily on the radio, and a sudden, disquieting clarity in the natural world, as empty roads and silenced skies returned birdsong and cleaner air to places long denied them. The second sequence maps a single day through the eight canonical hours from Matins to Compline, finding in that ancient liturgical structure a container for domestic life in lockdown, for the rhythms of partnership and solitude, for the persistence of ordinary tasks alongside the weight of collective loss. Throughout, Welsh landscape and Welsh language are present not as local colour but as a medium of deep time, the rivers, hills, and tree-names carrying histories that outlast any particular emergency. Clarke's formal instinct is for the short lyric line and the close observation, and the pamphlet's authority rests on that precision: a fox drinking moonlight from a bowl of water, laburnum flowering along the lanes of poor smallholdings, a blackbird holding his territory from a beech tree while the dead are counted.