The August Poetry Book Group will be meeting via Zoom
Monday, August 21st • 6:30 PM ET / 11:30 PM IST via Zoom
Session open to all: no registration required.
Click on this link to join the Zoom session
Find out about Solas Nua's Poetry Book Group and titles list
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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).
'Two very different poetry collections are keeping my bedside table happy, Ocean Vuong’s thrilling Time is a Mother and Jane Clarke’s A Change of Air. Some of Clarke’s work, in particular, is so close to the way I am thinking now about care and compassion, I feel recognised and lifted by her lines.' - Anne Enright, The Irish Times (The best books of 2023 so far)
‘… outstanding lyrical poems of place and heart … Clarke’s poems are above all else accessible, and in being so, the poet honours her reader. She removes a language blind, bringing us to the beating heart of her work. A Change in the Air is a generous collection by a poet resolute but gentle in the matter of emotional truth.’ - Eleanor Hooker, Books Ireland
‘What animates Jane Clarke are love and endurance: artfully calibrated, each section of A Change in the Air is an emotional complement to the next, for each poem hangs on one, or sometimes several, exquisitely clarified observations of landscape and of the figures in it, magnified as if through water. The two are in any case indivisible – the agricultural terrain is presented as a series of potent images whose significance is a measure of the unseen connection anchoring people to the world that made them.’ - Steve Whitaker, Yorkshire Times
On September 29th, we invite you to join Solas Nua and NYU's John Brademas Center for an evening of poetry with Irish poet Jane Clarke. Jane will read from her recently released third collection, A Change in the Air.
Ron Charles, book critic with The Washington Post, will host a public interview with Jane about her new collection.
About the Author
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.
All events are listed in Eastern Time and Irish Standard Time.
