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When the Tree Falls by Jane Clarke
GBP 10.99
The Poetry Book Society
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Jane Clarke’s lyrically eloquent poems bear witness to the rhythms of birth and death, celebration and mourning, endurance and regrowth. An elegiac sequence, inspired by the los
s of her father, moves gracefully through this second collection. Rooted in the everyday and backlit by mystery, here are poems to savour and return to, for the pleasure of finely honed lines that powerfully evoke the depth of our connections to people, place and nature.  Jane Clarke’s first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015 to both critical and public acclaim: '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 Nà Chuilleanáin, Dublin Review of Books 'Clarke registers with memorable cadence and verbal simplicity the changing pattern of the seasons as it shapes the daily life of a farm and, at the same time, the very human experience of loss, ambivalence and eternal impermanence.' – Peter Abbs, Resurgence & Ecologist '…this is poetry of exceptional beauty and accomplishment… a marvellous kind of arrival, a redemptive act where memory has meaning and the heart need never be kept indoors.' – Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet (Poetry Ireland) 'We may live out our individual lives, create our individual stories but we are connected to each other by way of our communal experiences, the rhythms of our lives played out in our shared mortality. The River beautifully invokes this connection. As readers we see that our experiences find an echo in others', that our grief is not new, that we can do the seemingly impossible: live through it.' – Tracey Youngblom, New Hibernia Review 'There is a sort of cleanness in her voice that deftly renders a moment and an image in such a way that the thing described opens up all of its compressed levels of meaning.' James Rogers, New Hibernia Review
