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Jane Clarke

A Change in the Air

Jane Clarke

Publication Date : 25 May 2023

ISBN: 9781780376592

Pages: 65
Size :216 x 138mm
Rights: World

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023

Shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023

Longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023

Jane 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 the 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).

'Two very different poetry collections are keeping my bedside table happy, Ocean Vuong’s thrilling Time is a Mother and Jane Clarke’s A Change of Air. Some of Clarke’s work, in particular, is so close to the way I am thinking now about care and compassion, I feel recognised and lifted by her lines.' - Anne Enright, The Irish Times (The best books of 2023 so far)

‘The delight and haunting memorability of the elegies that open her excellent third book of poems, A Change in the Air, can partly be explained by an ability to turn moments of steady objectivity into disclosures of emotion and insight … Clarke finds an archetypal purpose for her timely preoccupations, and local points of crossover between ordinary and extraordinary experience.  In this clear-flowing book, she seeks to get whole valleys onto the page, and to dwell in elemental magic, and she deserves to be celebrated for it.’ - Martin Dyar, Poetry Ireland Review

'In Jane Clarke's A Change in the Air her characteristic understated style is more pared back than ever ... a subtle collection' - Martina Evans, The Irish Times

‘… outstanding lyrical poems of place and heart … Clarke’s poems are above all else accessible, and in being so, the poet honours her reader. She removes a language blind, bringing us to the beating heart of her work. A Change in the Air is a generous collection by a poet resolute but gentle in the matter of emotional truth.’ - Eleanor Hooker, Books Ireland

‘What animates Jane Clarke are love and endurance: artfully calibrated, each section of A Change in the Air is an emotional complement to the next, for each poem hangs on one, or sometimes several, exquisitely clarified observations of landscape and of the figures in it, magnified as if through water. The two are in any case indivisible – the agricultural terrain is presented as a series of potent images whose significance is a measure of the unseen connection anchoring people to the world that made them.’ – Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times

'This week's poem is by the Irish poet Jane Clarke. Her work has a clarity and precision to it, a matter-of-factness that helps give form to the depth and weight of the words, which explore everyday living, past and present, and what shapes us as humans.' - The Scotsman, Poem of the Week, on 'Pit Ponies of Glendasan' from A Change in the Air

‘… this is a very full collection. It has a very striking range and depth. It has the sense of worlds lived in, families, societies … poems about reality, about the world we live in and conveyed in … particularly polished language …’. - Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, introducing A Change in the Air at the book’s launch in Dublin on 25 May 2023.

‘Her verse attends so closely to the land and the people of her rural homeland that it makes us attend more closely to our own. This summer she published A Change in the Air, a collection that glides gently from caring for her mother to remembering the Troubles to moving into a new house in the countryside.’ – Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club newsletter

Jane Clarke reads from A Change in the Air

Jane Clarke read her poem 'Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson's Wedding' from A Change in the Air for a Books Ireland feature.

Jane Clarke reads from When the Tree Falls

Jane Clarke reads and introduces twelve poems from When the Tree Falls: ‘Copper Soles’, ‘you pull yourself up’, ‘Those days’, ‘The Polling Station’, ‘The Hurley-maker’, ‘The trouble’, ‘Hers’, ‘Map’, ‘I’ve got you’, ‘Cypress’, ‘Aftergrass’ and ‘Kelly’s Garden’. Neil Astley filmed her reading selections from her two Bloodaxe collections at her home in Glenmalure in April 2019.

Jane Clarke reads from The River

Jane Clarke reads and introduces six poems from The River: ‘Daily Bread’, ‘The Blue Bible’, ‘Vows’, ‘Who owns the fields’, ‘On the Boat’ and ‘The River’. Neil Astley filmed her reading selections from her two Bloodaxe collections at her home in Glenmalure in April 2019.

Washington DC launch for Jane Clarke's When the Tree Falls

Jane Clarke's reading at NYU Washington, DC in October 2019, part of her US tour organised by Solas Nua. Jane read poems from her latest book, When the Tree Falls, and took questions from the audience. She also read four poems from All the Way Home, her illustrated booklet of poems in response to a First World War family archive held in the Mary Evans Picture Library, London (Smith|Doorstop, April 2019). She began and ended her reading with poems from her debut collection The River.

Jane Clarke live at Ledbury Poetry Festival

Jane Clarke reads and introduces a selection of her poems at Ledbury Poetry Festival on Friday 8th July 2017, when she shared the stage with fellow Irish poets Rita Ann Higgins and Louis de Paor. The poems she reads are from her Bloodaxe collection The River plus new work. Filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce.

 

Ireland: Click here to order from Books Upstairs in Dublin

USA: Click here to order from Indiebound or Bookshop.org

  

BOOKS BY Jane Clarke

The River

Jane Clarke

The River

Publication Date : 25 Jun 2015

Read More   amazon.co.uk
When the Tree Falls

Jane Clarke

When the Tree Falls

Publication Date : 26 Sep 2019

Read More   amazon.co.uk

Related News & Publicity

News & Publicity


Jane Clarke & Abigail Parry on T S Eliot Prize 2023 Shortlist

Jane Clarke & Abigail Parry on T S Eliot Prize 2023 Shortlist

Jane Clarke and Abigail Parry are shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2023 for their recent and forthcoming collections A Change in the Air and I Think We're Alone Now.

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News & Publicity


Jane Clarke on RTÉ Radio 1 & in The Irish Times

Jane Clarke on RTÉ Radio 1 & in The Irish Times

Jane Clarke interviews on CountryWide, Arena, Rattle, Forward Prizes & US Library of Congress podcast; reviews & features Books Ireland, Yorkshire Times & Irish Times.

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Poetry Events


Jane Clarke Readings

Jane Clarke Readings

Jane Clarke will be on tour in the US 25-29 Sept, with dates in Washington DC and Princeton. She will be in the UK for the Forward Prize Readings in Leeds on 16...

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News & Publicity


Jane Clarke shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023

Jane Clarke shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023

Jane Clarke's A Change in the Air shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023; Forward Prize Readings at Leeds Playhouse, 16 Oct; Meet the Poet Forward...

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