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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 beenshortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature's Ondaatje Prize,shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Caf 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 was longlisted for The Laurel Prize 2023 and shortlisted for both the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. It was also shortlisted for theT.S. Eliot Prize 2023.
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 * The Guardian, on When the Tree Falls * 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 * 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) * A poet who blends the contemporary with a great sense of the ancient and the rural... There is no sentimentality, no ornamentation; every word is incredibly honed and carries a really deep emotional weight. -- Jessica Traynor * Arena, RTE 1, on When the Tree Falls *
