International reading by Jane Clarke, Jane Hirshfield & Arundhathi Subramaniam

International reading by Jane Clarke, Jane Hirshfield & Arundhathi Subramaniam

 

Bloodaxe Editor Neil Astley hosted an international live streamed reading by Jane Clarke, Jane Hirshfield and Arundhathi Subramaniam on 15 December 2020.  They were celebrating the publication of their new or recent poetry collections, and joined Neil in Northumberland from their homes in Co Wicklow, California and Bombay. They each gave two sets of readings, followed by a discussion that revealed many connections between these three outstanding poets.
 
This extraordinary reading and discussion is now on YouTube.
 
 
 
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Jane Clarke: When the Tree Falls
 
Jane Clarke’s lyrically eloquent poems bear witness to the rhythms of birth and death, celebration and mourning, endurance and regrowth. An elegiac sequence, inspired by the loss of her father, moves gracefully through When the Tree Falls, her second collection. Rooted in the everyday and backlit by mystery, these are poems to savour and return to, for the pleasure of finely honed lines that powerfully evoke the depth of our connections to people, place and nature.
 
Jane Clarke was grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon in Ireland and now lives in Co. Wicklow. She combines her writing with work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015. It was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, given for a distinguished work of fiction, non-fiction or poetry evoking the spirit of a place. When the Tree Falls was shortlisted for the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020, as well as being longlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize 2020.
 
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Jane Hirshfield: Ledger
 
Jane Hirshfield is a visionary American writer whose poems ask nothing less than what it is to be human. Both sensual meditations and passionate investigations, they reveal complex truths in language luminous and precise. Rooted in the living world, her poems celebrate and elucidate a hard-won affirmation of our human fate. Her urgent new collection Ledger is a book of personal, ecological and political reckoning. These poems inscribe a ledger personal and communal, a registry of our time's and lives’ dilemmas as well as a call to action on climate change, social justice and the plight of refugees.
 
Jane Hirshfield’s first book of poetry published in the UK was Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (2005). This was followed by four later collections, also from Bloodaxe, After (2006), a Poetry Book Society Choice, which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, Come, Thief (2012), The Beauty (2015) and now Ledger (2020). She lives in the Mill Valley in northern California.
 
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Arundhathi Subramaniam: Love Without a Story
 
Arundhathi Subramaniam is an award-winning poet and writer on spirituality and culture. The poems of her latest collection, Love Without a Story, celebrate an expanding kinship: of passion and friendship, mythic quest and modern-day longing, in a world animated by dialogue and dissent, delirium and silence. Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. Love Without a Story is her third book from Bloodaxe, following Where I Live: New & Selected Poems (2009) and When God Is a Traveller (2014), a Poetry Book Society Choice which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
 
She has also written The Book of Buddha (Penguin, 2005) and Sadhguru: More Than a Life (Penguin, 2010); co-edited Confronting Love (Penguin, 2005), an anthology of Indian love poems in English; and edited Pilgrim's India: An Anthology (Penguin, 2011) and Eating God: A Book of Bhakti Poetry (Penguin, 2014). Currently based in Chennai, she divides her time between India and New York.
 
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To order copies of the poets’ books direct from Bloodaxe, please click on these links:
 
Jane Clarke: When the Tree Falls (2019)
Jane Clarke: The River
 
Jane Hirshfield: Ledger (2020)
Jane Hirshfield: Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems
 
Arundhathi Subramaniam: Love Without a Story (2020)
Arundhathi Subramaniam: When God Is a Traveller
Arundhathi Subramaniam: Where I Live: New & Selected Poems

[25 November 2020]


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