Jane Clarke

The River

What surprises me now is not that you’re gone

but how I go on without you, as if I’d lost

no more than a finger. My hand still strong,

perhaps stronger, can do what it must,

like carving your name on a branch from the beech

by the Suck, letting the river take you,

so I can call myself free. Only sometimes,

like yesterday or the day before, last night or this morning,

the river flows backwards, uphill to my door.

*

Who owns the field?

Is it the one who is named in the deeds

whose hands never touched the clay

or is it the one who gathers the sheaves

takes a scythe to the thistles, plants the beech,

digs out the dockweed, lays the live hazel?

Is it the one who is named in the deeds

or the one who pulls ragwort on his knees,

lifts rocks into a cart, splits larch for stakes,

the one who gathers the sheaves,

slashhooks the briars, scatters the seed,

cuts his hand on barbed wire, hangs the gate?

Is it the one who is named in the deeds

or the one who could surely lead

to where children made a hiding place

in an old lime tree. He gathers the sheaves.

Is it the one who tends cattle and sheep,

and can tell you how the field got its name?

Is it the one who is named in the deeds

or the one who gathers the sheaves?

*

Daily Bread

A white mist rises as she sifts a pound of flour

into the worn, tin basin, wide as Lough Corrib.

Blue veins lie like rivers on the map of her hands.

She measures one teaspoon of bread soda,

two teaspoons of salt. The plait at the nape

of her neck: a fisherman’s rope coiled at the quay.

She scoops a hollow, pours a pint of buttermilk,

splashing and spluttering into the well.

With the rhythm of a rower she kneads rough dough

on the flour-dusted table, pushing it away,

pulling it back, pushing it away again.

With her wrist she flicks a lock, silver-grey frost

in December, from her high cheek bones. Readying

the bread for its hot harbour, she cuts a deep cross.

*

Vows

I can’t promise it’s chiselled from gold

in spirals that speak of forever.

I can’t tell you it’s wise as a mountain

with pines that reach for heaven.

I can’t promise it’s flawless as honey

gathered by bees in bell heather.

I can’t say it’s simple as silk

spun from cocoon into treasure.

But I promise it’s rooted as rowan

with berries that sing to September.

I promise its to and its fro

will surprise like Glenmalure weather,

a seasoned row boat,

moored or unmoored at your pleasure.

9 Honey

10 Daily Bread

11 Rhode Island Reds

12 Harness Room

13 The Blue Bible

14 The Globe

15 The Suck

16 Dressage

17 Against the Flow

18 Dry Stone Wall

19 Dropping Slow

20 Epithalamium

21 Vows

22 Blue Ridge Trail

23 For Isobel

25 When I knew

26 White Fields

27 Who owns the field?

28 Before the war

29 Lighthouse Keeper

30 The Catch

31 Every life

32 River at Dawn

33 The Fisherman

34 The Suitcase

35 Inheritance

36 For Michael

37 Let there be

38 Broken

39 The Ringer

40 Kintsugi

41 Sorrel Hill

43 First Love

44 Enclosed

45 Arctic Hare

46 Dusk

47 On the Boat

48 Cows at Dugort

49 Among the Cows

50 The Price

51 Dust Road

52 January

53 Hands

54 Winter

55 Back of an Envelope

56 Where the River Deepens

57 all I will need

58 Every Tree

59 Sing

60 The River

63 Acknowledgements

'These are subtle, tender poems of love, loss and growing up on a farm in rural Ireland. Jane Clarke writes with a fine eye for remembered detail in language marked by good farm words like “slane and sickle”, “clout and stud nails”. The river Suck, and the river of life, run through the book and the farmland where the poet was brought up. Every poem leaves something in the mind: the beauty and cruelty of farming, the life of land and animals, of parents remembered in their strength, and in their ageing. A quiet, powerful collection.’ – Gillian Clarke

'These poems burn with the ferocity of their intent in supple and profound music. Many of them are rooted in family life and the seasonal farm work Jane Clarke depicts with such respect and compassion. Others treat of adult relationships in the face of a beautiful, if brutal world. The river music is sometimes the real river music of the Suck and other rivers with their riparian birds and hunger for the sea. Her philosophical bent finds the river in us, in the emotional fluxes, whether in the rapids or the calm shallows. This is not pastoral poetry though there’s plenty of pasture in it, and hens and hay and alders and willows and heifers.

'There’s a visionary at work here, a shaper and shifter, moving us in language that is plain, exact, and true. She invokes Heraclitus’ famous river that can’t be stepped in twice; she could as justly invoke Hopkins’ Heraclitean fire. And the comfort of the Resurrection – for nature to Clarke is a site of renewal and integration. There is both heartbreak and heart’s ease in this auspicious debut from an accomplished craftswoman.’ – Paula Meehan

‘Clear, direct, lovely: Jane Clarke’s voice slips into the Irish tradition with such ease, it is as though she had always been at the heart of it.’ – Anne Enright

'Jane’s poems have a two-fold quality of tenderness – not simply their affectionate respect for people and for ways of life, but also the courage to go close to the raw places, facing the grief and unease which comes from loving what can be or already has been lost.' – Philip Gross

‘The River is a collection of poems, not prose masquerading as poetry. Jane Clarke’s lines are honed, measured, finely and finally settled on. She has many of the qualities of her mentor and name-sake Gillian: strength and originality of metaphor, an ear for the music of language and an ability to allow the poem space to accommodate the reader. I recommend The River to readers and writers of poetry.’ - Tony Curtis, Poetry Wales

‘Symbols of transience and change, images of rivers weave through this collection exploring themes of loss, creativity and the natural world. This is a strikingly assured debut that blends touching domestic detail with searing insights. A meditative, thought-provoking collection of verse that stays with the reader, offering solace and inspiration long after the last page is turned.’ – Juanita Coulson, The Lady (Christmas Books 2015)

Jane Clarke reads three poems from her debut collection, The River