Jane Clarke's A Change in the Air: reviews, interviews & Books of the Year 2023
Interviews on Poetry People, CountryWide, Drivetime, Arena & US Library of Congress & Planet Poetry podcasts; reviews in Books Ireland, Irish Times & Sunday...
An exhibition of artworks responding to Jane's poems is at Coach House Gallery, Dublin until Jan 2025. The launch reading for A Change in the Air is on YouTube, along...
Jane Clarke & Abigail Parry on T S Eliot Prize 2023 Shortlist
Jane Clarke & Abigail Parry shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize; Videos & reviews on T S Eliot Prize website; T S Eliot Prize Readings broadcast BBC Radio 3's The...
Now that her heart is bent over
like larkspur after a storm,
she stays in bed past milking time,
pulling the quilt
tight around her shoulders
until her collie barks her
down the stairs
to lift the backdoor latch.
She kneels to light the cipeens
piled on last night’s embers.
Her bones creak
like the bolt on the door of the barn.
A cup of oats, two cups of water,
a pinch of salt –
porridge, tea and tablets,
a meal for a queen.
Every day without him
is too long;
she’s waiting
with the tired cows at the gate.
*
Pit Ponies of Glendasan
Hitched to an eight-hour shift
in britchens, hames and traces,
they follow the miners’ carbide lights,
halt under hoppers, turn
on a thruppence and lean into their collars
to pull the five-wagon train.
Low-set cobs from the Curragh,
a piebald and two greys, their hooves
fall heavy as hammers on granite.
They haul lengths of larch for pit props,
pneumatic drills, boxes of gelignite,
and, from time to time, deliver
injured men back to daylight.
The miners pat their necks in passing
and feed them windfall apples –
comrades in toil and first to halt,
legs locked at a sudden rumbling, a change
in the air or the rush of running water.
*
September 1914
The week before he left for France
we leaned a ladder into the apple trees,
picked Cox’s Orange Pippins,
Newton Wonders, Brownlee’s Russets,
laid them one by one
on dusty floorboards in the attic,
then planted hyacinths and amaryllis for spring.
We sat out after dinner
and talked of how we loved
this time of year,
when hollyhocks are past their best
but still stand tall
in copper, pink and cream,
beside clematis and the last of the sweet pea.
*
Mater Misericordiae
Still new to each other
when you found the lump,
we held our breath as the surgeon
marked the spot with an X.
A porter pushed your trolley
down the echoing corridor –
I stayed at the edge of your bed.
The matron asked was I a relation
and under the Sacred Heart lamp
I called myself a friend.
Later I searched for coins
and a pay phone
to tell your mother
you were back in the ward,
sleepy but smiling.
The rose-petal scar on your breast
was tiny, but enough to remind us
we’d already found what mattered.
*
Spalls
To help us grow a garden, my mother and father travelled
across the Bog of Allen and over the Wicklow Gap.
They’d have preferred to drive west to Galway or Mayo,
they’d have preferred a husband and children
but their daughter loved a woman. We’d have the table set
for breakfast: rashers, black pudding, fried bread and eggs.
When the soil had warmed, we unloaded shovels
and rakes, buckets of compost and the rusted iron bar
for prising out rocks. The back seat was thronged
with pots of seedlings my mother had nurtured all winter.
We worked to her bidding: loosen tangled roots before planting,
sow marigolds next to beans, sprinkle Epsom salts around roses.
My father took off on his own to spud ragwort or clip a hedge.
One day he spent hours gathering stones of different shapes and sizes.
By evening he’d built us a wall under the holly, held together
by gravity and friction, hearted with handfuls of spalls.
Contents List
10 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
Related Reviews
Some reviews for When the Tree Falls
'The 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, on When the Tree Falls, Poem of the Week, The Guardian
'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
'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, speaking on RTE Radio 1's Arena(Poetry books of 2019)
‘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)
‘When the Tree Falls confirms Jane Clarke’s position as one of the most rewarding poets in these islands: she knows how to cut a line, how to shape words to the right instrument and then to make that thing sing.’ – Tony Curtis,Poetry Wales (Poetry Books of the Year 2019)
‘Clarke has clearly paid the closest attention to the lives and worlds around her. Though there is a deep sadness in many of these poems, there is also a lightness and a willingness to let tenderness and humour shine through… Clarke delicately attends to the rhythms and textures of life, weaving themes together in a subtle and carefully-constructed work.’ – Julie Morrissy, Poetry Ireland Review on When the Tree Falls
