Jane Clarke’s Coracle explores what it means to care for each other and the natural world in the midst of social and environmental jeopardy. With a timeless lyricism her poems attend to lives, language and landscape. Her finely observed, distilled and intimate poems reflect on our kinship with all living things. The coracle, a small, simple boat used from antiquity to the present day symbolises our shared vulnerability and resilience. Heart-stirring and wise, this collection – her fourth – faces the reality of loss while celebrating acts of restoration that inspire hope.
Jane Clarke's previous collection, A Change in the Air (2023), was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Forward Prize for Best Collection and for Ireland's Farmgate Café National Poetry Award, as well as being longlisted for the Laurel Prize.
Praise for Jane Clarke's poetry:
'A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke is a collection that deals with contemporary and historic rural life in Ireland, in particular its crafts and traditions. Set against accounts of queer love in a changing Ireland, these poems are musical, moving and true; each word chosen with deep care, each phrase made with a craftswoman’s precision.' – Jessica Traynor, for the Forward Prize 2023 Judges
‘Jane Clarke writes poems of lyrical beauty and real heart. Rich with the tradition of Irish pastoral or nature poetry, a whole landscape can live inside one of her carefully tuned lines. But from the rich soil of tradition, Jane brings forward a poetry that is subtly changed, alert to political and social issues and fraught as nature writing so often is now with anxieties about the changing climate. In Jane's poems, we can hear echoes of voices past and present, the farmlands of Seamus Heaney, the lyricism of Kerry Hardie. And there's also a melodic sense of nature in all its fine detail, a chorus made by water, growth, diversity, precious and under threat. And if that wasn't enough, there's always a strong emotional core too: love, desire, hurt, and comfort. All of these can be found in her poems.’ – Seán Hewitt, introducing Jane Clarke on The Glimpse podcast
'The title of Jane Clarke’s A Change in the Air rather neatly conjures the country dweller’s sensitivity to the slightest shift in the weather, literal or figurative, meteorological or emotional. Though she may be influenced by Patrick Kavanagh, by Ted Hughes, and by Alice Oswald, Jane Clarke manages to plow her own furrow in poems of farm and family life that are notable for their attentiveness to, and delight in, the telling detail.' – Paul Muldoon (with Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul), T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 judges' comment
‘A Change in the Air, Jane Clarke’s third collection, is a quiet, stoical meditation on fragility and mortality. Humanity takes its place within the rhythms of a natural world built on acceptance, community, and renewal. The title promises the best kind of revolution: freshness and wholesomeness – and the poems which follow deliver on this … In Jane Clarke’s hands, clarity, purity and strength speak for themselves. Her words are weighed and used sparingly. They take your breath away.’ – John Field, T.S. Eliot Prize Reviewer
'Jane Clarke is a revelation. Her poems are concise, often in elegant honed couplets and triolets – perfectly shaped, deftly crafted, well controlled and tempered – and her line endings are masterful, holding the moment in a breath before releasing the connecting thought.' – Maggie Mackay, The Friday Poem, introducing her in-depth review of A Change in the Air
'It is a really beautiful collection. I am moved to find all those flowers and birds so precisely placed, the farmstead nooks and crannies, the delicately nuanced explorations of big themes – the Great War, neighbourly gestures at a time of sectarian entanglement – generous pictures of [Jane Clarke's] soul-landscape, love poems. Collections of this quality are very rare.’ – Michael Longley, on A Change in the Air
'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
'Critical to Clarke’s celebrated third collection, A Change in the Air, is how land bears witness to history. Shortlisted, at the time of writing, for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize for Best Collection and longlisted for the Laurel Prize, the politics seep through like water in a bog. The voice avoids the rant and is more seductive and convincing for it.' – Lisa Kelly, Magma
'She is a poet of great skill, her language is shaped and eloquent, emotional but totally without sentimentality. At times the simplicity of her words and her frequent choice of the couplet form might suggest an ease that deeper reading of these poems will soon dispel.' – James Caruth, The North, on A Change in the Air
‘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 ‘Pit Ponies of Glendasan’ from A Change in the Air for the T.S. Eliot Prize readings series.
Jane Clarke reads ‘Recipe for a Bog’ from A Change in the Air for the T.S. Eliot Prize readings series.
Jane Clarke reads ‘Spalls’ from A Change in the Air for the T.S. Eliot Prize readings series.
Jane Clarke talks about her collection A Change in the Air for the T.S. Eliot Prize readings series.
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 A Change in the Air at Newcastle Poetry Festival
Jane Clarke reads and introduces poems from A Change in the Air as part of the T.S. Eliot Prize celebration event at the 2024 Newcastle Poetry Festival.
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 first 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 first 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.
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