When the Tree Falls

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. Jane Clarke's first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe in 2015 to both critical and public acclaim. When the Tree Falls is shortlisted for two of Ireland's premier literary awards, the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award 2020 and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020.
About the Author: Originally from a farm in the west of Ireland, Jane Clarke now lives with her partner in Co. Wicklow. She holds a BA in English and Philosophy from Trinity College, Dublin and an MPhil in Writing from the University of South Wales. She has a background in psychoanalytic psychotherapy and combines writing with her work as a creative writing tutor and group facilitator. She received the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Prize in 2014 and her other awards include the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition (2014), Poems for Patience (2013), iYeats (2010), and Listowel Writers' Week (2007). Her poems have been published in The Irish Times, The Irish Independent, The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph and The Herald Scotland, and by many journals, magazines, anthologies and websites. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015, and was 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. She also won the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry with three poems from The River, 'For Isobel', 'Blue Bible' and 'Every Tree', as well as the inaugural Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year in the Irish Book Awards 2016 for a later poem, 'In Glasnevin'. Jane was awarded a literature bursary by the Arts Council of Ireland in 2017. All the Way Home, an illustrated booklet of poems responding to a First World War family archive will be published by Smith/Doorstop in April 2019. Her second collection, When the Tree Falls, published by Bloodaxe in 2019, When the Tree Falls is shortlisted for two of Ireland's premier literary awards, the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award 2020 and the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2020.