When the Tree Falls

Shortlisted for the 2020 Pigott Poetry Prize

Shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award 2020

Shortlisted for the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020<br />

Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020

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 loss 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.

‘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)

'Jane Clarke is a really extraordinary poet. This is only her second collection, but this is a really timeless voice. She's a poet who blends the contemporary with a great sense of the ancient and the rural. Her first collection The River was a fantastic piece of work. This new collection When the Tree Falls is focussed very much around the death of her father, but it's an incredibly celebratory poetry collection that really looks at the nuts and bolts of the actual life on a farm in Roscommon...she finds such beauty in it, with such simplicity of language. There's no sentimentality, no ornamentation; every word is incredibly honed and carries a really deep emotional weight.' - Jessica Traynor, speaking on RTE Radio 1's Arena(Poetry books of 2019)

‘When the Tree Falls confirms Jane Clarke’s position as one of the most rewarding poets in these islands: she knows how to cut a line, how to shape words to the right instrument and then to make that thing sing.’ – Tony Curtis, Poetry Wales (Poetry Books of the Year 2019)

'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

‘Clarke has clearly paid the closest attention to the lives and worlds around her. Though there is a deep sadness in many of these poems, there is also a lightness and a willingness to let tenderness and humour shine through… Clarke delicately attends to the rhythms and textures of life, weaving themes together in a subtle and carefully-constructed work.’ – Julie Morrissy, Poetry Ireland Review on When the Tree Falls

'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, on When the Tree Falls, Poem of the Week, The Guardian

'Giving vent to her love for her departed father through a shared affiliation with the rustic landscape of her formative home in Roscommon, When the Tree Falls is a protracted and desperately moving song of loss... [a] wonderful, profoundly complete collection of poems.' - Steve Whitaker, The Yorkshire Times

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.