The River - Paperback

by Jane Clarke (Author)

The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke's debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on.

'These are subtle, tender poems of love, loss and growing up on a farm in rural Ireland... Every poem leaves something in the mind: the beauty and cruelty of farming, the life of land and animals, of parents remembered in their strength, and in their ageing. A quiet, powerful collection.' - Gillian Clarke

Author Biography

Jane Clarke was born in 1961 and grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon. She lives with her partner in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin, and an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales, 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. In 2016 she won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers' Week Poem of the Year Award. She was awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary in 2017. All the Way Home, Jane's illustrated booklet of poems in response to a First World War family archive held in the Mary Evans Picture Library, London, was published by Smith-Doorstop in 2019, with her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls, following in September.