Description
Book SynopsisJane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world. A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke's widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019).
Trade ReviewThe poems are plain-spoken and restrained: they resist easy consolation. Their austerity serves to intensify the unmediated emotion they almost don’t want to capture… a poem might be born of personal loss, but, once completed and published, it has entered a different timespan, and becomes the forge where other minds are shaped and brightened. -- Carol Rumens * The Guardian, on When the Tree Falls *
Her observation of nature is...precise, her poems are…honed to the bone. Clarke knows exactly how much to withhold so that the understated artful phrases echo eloquently across the white space of the unsaid. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times *
The Irish poet Jane Clarke has followed a great debut collection with an even better second book. When the Tree Falls talks about her farming father in his last years. It delivers a clean, hard-earned simplicity and a lovely sense of line. -- Anne Enright * The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2019) *
A poet who blends the contemporary with a great sense of the ancient and the rural… There is no sentimentality, no ornamentation; every word is incredibly honed and carries a really deep emotional weight. -- Jessica Traynor * Arena, RTE 1, on When the Tree Falls *
Table of Contents10 After 11 Butter for Queens 12 Raspberries 13 District Nurse 14 Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson’s Wedding 15 Given 16 Becoming 17 All the horses she’s ever loved 18 Eggs 19 All she needed 20 Milk 21 The Lookout 22 The Arch PIT PONIES OF GLENASAN 25 Christmas Morning 26 Pit Ponies of Glendasan 27 The Pay 28 Mullacor WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER 31 September 1914 32 In the dugout 33 The Game 34 After we’re gone 35 Bouchavesnes 36 Priam of Troy 37 Ling 38 When all this is over 39 Snow 40 Pianist YOU COULD SAY IT BEGINS 42 You could say it begins 44 Crossings 45 Flight 47 Family Bible 48 When the sun 51 The Dipper 52 Lazy Beds 53 skein 54 Passage 55 Wildfire 56 Rowan 57 Refuge 58 Recipe for a bog 59 spawn 60 At Purteen Harbour 61 Little Tern Colony, Kilcoole 63 Mater Misericordiae 64 The Key 65 Spalls 66 Her first 67 Wife 68 Ballinabarney 69 First Earlies 70 Shepherd 71 Fences 72 Thief in April 73 Stepping in 74 June 76 Notes 78 Acknowledgements
