The River

Winner of the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry

Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016

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.

‘Quiet, lucid, subtle poems, nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background in rural Ireland, and the poet’s enduring attachment to it.’ - Moniza Alvi, Judge, RLS Ondaatje Prize

‘The winner emerged with a clarity, a hard earned singularity – a quiet, modest voice, one which has an integrity of the lived life to it – neither showy, nor glib, no tricks, or easy punch-lines – but a definite and respectful sense of tradition. Fine detail marked these poems out, ‘the fishtail chisel with its shallow sweep’, ‘the fiddleback grain’. Here are poems of memory, of childhood, and affection, written with lyrical grace, finesse and elegance. This year’s winner, twice shortlisted before, is Jane Clarke.’ – Judges of the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry

‘It’s a stand-out collection this year. If you want a masterclass in how to write the lyric, you read Jane Clarke.' - Dave Lordan, 5 favourite poetry books of the year, RTE Radio 1's Arena

'... this is poetry of exceptional beauty and accomplishment.' - Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet (Poetry Ireland)

‘This book will no doubt fit into Ireland’s poetic tradition so seamlessly as to seem to have always been there. However, the themes of Clarke’s tender, musical poems are universal, and The River is a book of profound and enduring beauty.’ – Roy Marshall, The Compass

‘Since Seamus Heaney’s death in August 2013, poetry lovers have been eagerly seeking a successor to Ireland’s greatest modern poet. The publication... of Wicklow-based Jane Clarke’s first collection, The River, will send shudders of excitement through the poetry world and beyond. From a farming background, Clarke, like Heaney, draws on natural inspirations such as rivers, stone walls, animals and birds for an uplifting, gentle reflection on the human condition.’ – Joe Duffy, Irish Mail on Sunday

'Clarke's poetry is word perfect. Like Heaney, she is a deceptively tough poet... Clarke writes about nature from the inside.’ – Kevin Higgins, Galway Advertiser

'The virtues of Jane Clarke’s writing include a broad sympathy that never usurps the voice of the other, that guides the reader to understanding and respect; a pleasure in ingenious objects and crafts that is deftly transmitted; and a clarity which does not deny mystery but makes room for it. ’ – Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Dublin Review of Books

‘These beautiful poems about Clarke’s farming family and her childhood in the west of Ireland live on the table by my bed. The battered pages show that I love these poems, and read them again and again. They are gentle, understated, and capture rural people that our world tends to ignore.’ – James Rebanks, The Week, Best Books [on The River]

Jane Clarke was born in 1961 and grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon. She lives with her wife 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 BloodaxeBooks in 2015. It was the first poetry title to be 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.

Her second book-length collection, When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books, 2019), was shortlisted for the2020 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. Her third book-length collection, A Change in the Air (Bloodaxe Books, 2023), was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023 and the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

In 2019 Jane edited Origami Doll, New and Collected Shirley McClure (Arlen House, 2019) and guest-edited The North 61: Irish Issue (The Poetry Business, 2019) with Nessa O’Mahony. Her illustrated anthology Windfall: Irish Nature Poems to Inspire and Connect (Hachette Books Ireland, 2023), edited by Jane Clarke & illustrated by Jane Carkill, was published on 1 November 2023. Coracle, a limited edition booklet of ten poems responding to biodiversity loss and restoration, was commissioned and published by MoLI, Museum of Literature Ireland, in 2023.

In May 2020 Jane Clarke presented The Miners' Way, a half-hour feature for BBC Radio 4 that was chosen for Radio 4's Pick of the Week. This included a new sequence of poems now included in her third collection A Change in the Air, which also includes some poems from All the Way Home (Smith|Doorstop, 2019), her illustrated booklet of poems in response to a First World War family archive held in the Mary Evans Picture Library, London.

Jane Clarke received the Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award 2022, which will enable her to undertake a collaborative writing project with sheep farmer and author James Rebanks on his fell farm in the Lake District, Cumbria.