Coracle

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.

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.

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.

Jane Clarke was born in 1961 and grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon. Since 1996 she has lived with her wife in Glenmalure, Co. Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator.

Her first collection, The River, published in 2015, was the first poetry title to be shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize. In 2016 she won the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry and the inaugural Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year Award.

Her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls (2019), was shortlisted for the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Cafe National Poetry Award 2020.

A Change in the Air (2023), was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 for nature and ecopoetry, and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023, the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 and Ireland’s Farmgate Cafe National Poetry Award 2024.

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