Description

Jane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world. A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke’s widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019).

Publisher Review

The poems are plain-spoken and restrained: they resist easy consolation. Their austerity serves to intensify the unmediated emotion they almost don't want to capture... a poem might be born of personal loss, but, once completed and published, it has entered a different timespan, and becomes the forge where other minds are shaped and brightened. -- Carol Rumens * The Guardian, on When the Tree Falls * Her observation of nature is...precise, her poems are...honed to the bone. Clarke knows exactly how much to withhold so that the understated artful phrases echo eloquently across the white space of the unsaid. -- Martina Evans * The Irish Times * The Irish poet Jane Clarke has followed a great debut collection with an even better second book. When the Tree Falls talks about her farming father in his last years. It delivers a clean, hard-earned simplicity and a lovely sense of line. -- Anne Enright * The Irish Times (Books of the Year 2019) * A poet who blends the contemporary with a great sense of the ancient and the rural... There is no sentimentality, no ornamentation; every word is incredibly honed and carries a really deep emotional weight. -- Jessica Traynor * Arena, RTE 1, on When the Tree Falls *