Jane Clarke's fourth collection Coracle published October 2026. Numerous events & workshops this Autumn, including at Wicklow on 19 Nov. US events in Washington DC,...
Jane Clarke Coracle: interviews, reviews & poem features
Jane Clarke was interviewed about her fourth collection Coracle on RTÉ Radio 1's CountryWide and on Poetry People. Poem of the Week feature in The Irish Times of 31...
The mottled-brown blackbird
will not let the wind distract her –
she’s gathering moss, roots, twigs,
ribs of bark and tattered leaves.
She lifts a scrap of baling twine,
bright blue in her dusk yellow beak,
weaves it into the bowl
hidden low in the hawthorn hedge.
She plasters her nest
with muck from the sheep shed,
then moulds it around her body
till it’s robust as wattle and daub.
There will come magpies, foxes,
badgers, stoats. And still
she lays her heart in the basket boat.
*
Legend
Back when girls were schooled
to obey, we learned of a woman
who quit her father’s domain
and took to the rutted roads.
Brave as the wind, she dismissed
warring chieftains like children,
shouldered a bishop’s mantle,
commanded the Shannon’s flow.
She banished the cobbler
who raised a hand to his wife,
and counted buds on the ash
as a king counts his silver.
Washerwomen, scullery girls,
spinners and weavers:
all walked in Brigid’s footsteps
and couldn’t be called back home.
*
Witness
News of eviction spreads fast
through a village. Church bells toll
and neighbours run from the fields.
Against rifle butts and bayonets
they hammer pots and pans,
wield blackthorn sticks, fling stones.
Bailiffs batter down cottage doors,
beat the sick from their beds.
Fuelled by whiskey, policemen spit
on old men pleading, kick children
like mongrels. Is it guilt turns them
vicious as weasels among hens?
The girls they affront could be
their cousins. That woman carved thin
as willow might be their mother.
The families they throw at the side
of the road like scraps on a midden,
these, these are their people.
*
Máire
Every evening after dinner she slipped out
the back door and down through the orchard.
Crouched on a fallen capstone she talked
to the babies buried under grassy mounds.
She gave each a name and told them news
of her day; she’d scrubbed the quarry tiles
in the kitchen with Sunlight soap and polished
the dining room table with beeswax and rags
till it shone bright as a chalice. She described
the women stranded at the front door,
two or three every week; eyes downcast,
cardboard suitcases clenched in one hand,
the way she gripped her dream, a home
of her own someday to keep neat as a pin.
She bid the babies good night,
tender as the mother she’d never known,
then pulled the cillín gate
and hurried back to lock in the hens
before the fox came prowling
or one of the Sisters raised the alarm.
Contents List
11 Coracle 12 Roots 13 Kingfisher 14 Ben 15 Rainy Night in Cloverhill 16 A long way 17 Chickweed 18 Barmbrack 19 Mittens 20 in the new moon’s arms 21 Fuerty Rain 22 The Pump 23 Harvest 24 The White Gate 25 To my father * 29 Legend 30 Brigid 31 Perry’s Daughter 32 The Women from Crinnagh 33 Anna in Mayo 34 Ilfracombe 35 Witness 36 For I have died many times 37 Culm 38 Reeds 39 Shoeing the Mare 41 Máire 42 Rooks 44 Threshold * 47 Cherry Trees, Charente 48 Love is a place 50 Shirley 51 Calf 52 Goats on Leitrim Hill 53 Come October 54 Highwood Church, November 55 Solstice 56 Goldmines River 57 Hedge School 58 The Man from the Bogs Commission 60 Barnacullian Bog 61 Ballydermot Wood 62 Marsh Fritillary 63 Compass 64 Midwinter, Glenmalure * 67 Currach at Sheephaven Bay 68 Hen Harriers of Sliabh Aughty 69 Child 70 Sightings 72 Praise 73 Laying the hedge 74 Inishbofin Meadow 75 White-tailed Eagles 76 Morning Ireland 77 The plumber 78 Summer in the Mournes 80 Elegy 81 Árainn Walls 82 On Árainn 83 Basket Boat 84 Before dark 87 Notes 91 Acknowledgements 94 Biographical note
