A Change in the Air

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 the 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). A Change in the Air was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023
and shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. It is shortlisted the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

ISBN-13: 9781780376592

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books

Publication Date: 08-08-2023

Pages: 80

Product Dimensions: 6.25(w) x 9.25(h) x (d)

Jane Clarke was born in 1961 and grew up on a farm in County Roscommon. She lives in Glenmalure, County Wicklow, where she combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator, and has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Her work has been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe, The River (2015), When the Tree Falls (2019) and A Change in the Air (2023). A Change in the Air was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. It was also shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

Table of Contents

10     After
    11     Butter for Queens
    12     Raspberries
    13     District Nurse
    14     Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson’s Wedding
    15     Given
    16     Becoming
    17     All the horses she’s ever loved
    18     Eggs
    19     All she needed
    20     Milk
    21     The Lookout
    22     The Arch

PIT PONIES OF GLENASAN
    25     Christmas Morning
    26     Pit Ponies of Glendasan
    27     The Pay
    28     Mullacor

WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER
    31     September 1914
    32     In the dugout
    33     The Game
    34     After we’re gone
    35     Bouchavesnes
    36     Priam of Troy
    37     Ling
    38     When all this is over
    39     Snow
    40     Pianist

YOU COULD SAY IT BEGINS
    42     You could say it begins
    44     Crossings
    45     Flight
    47     Family Bible
    48     When the sun

    51     The Dipper
    52     Lazy Beds
    53     skein
    54     Passage
    55     Wildfire
    56     Rowan
    57     Refuge
    58     Recipe for a bog
    59     spawn
    60     At Purteen Harbour
    61     Little Tern Colony, Kilcoole

    63     Mater Misericordiae
    64     The Key
    65     Spalls
    66     Her first
    67     Wife
    68     Ballinabarney
    69     First Earlies
    70     Shepherd
    71     Fences
    72     Thief in April
    73     Stepping in
    74     June

    76     Notes
    78     Acknowledgements Show More