Winner of the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry
Shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2016
The textured language, vivid imagery and musical rhythms of Jane Clarke’s debut collection convey a distinctive voice and vision. With lyrical grace these poems contemplate shadow and sorrow as well as creativity and connection. The threat of loss is never far away but neither is delight in the natural world and what it offers. Rooted in rural life, this poet of poignant observation achieves restraint and containment while communicating intense emotions. The rivers that flow through the collection evoke the inevitability of change and our need to find again and again how to go on.
‘Quiet, lucid, subtle poems, nevertheless urgent in their presentation of a farming background in rural Ireland, and the poet’s enduring attachment to it.’ - Moniza Alvi, Judge, RLS Ondaatje Prize
‘The winner emerged with a clarity, a hard earned singularity – a quiet, modest voice, one which has an integrity of the lived life to it – neither showy, nor glib, no tricks, or easy punch-lines – but a definite and respectful sense of tradition. Fine detail marked these poems out, ‘the fishtail chisel with its shallow sweep’, ‘the fiddleback grain’. Here are poems of memory, of childhood, and affection, written with lyrical grace, finesse and elegance. This year’s winner, twice shortlisted before, is Jane Clarke.’ – Judges of the Hennessy Literary Award for Emerging Poetry
‘It’s a stand-out collection this year. If you want a masterclass in how to write the lyric, you read Jane Clarke.' - Dave Lordan, 5 favourite poetry books of the year, RTE Radio 1's Arena
'... this is poetry of exceptional beauty and accomplishment.' - Thomas McCarthy, Trumpet (Poetry Ireland)
‘This book will no doubt fit into Ireland’s poetic tradition so seamlessly as to seem to have always been there. However, the themes of Clarke’s tender, musical poems are universal, and The River is a book of profound and enduring beauty.’ – Roy Marshall, The Compass
‘Since Seamus Heaney’s death in August 2013, poetry lovers have been eagerly seeking a successor to Ireland’s greatest modern poet. The publication... of Wicklow-based Jane Clarke’s first collection, The River, will send shudders of excitement through the poetry world and beyond. From a farming background, Clarke, like Heaney, draws on natural inspirations such as rivers, stone walls, animals and birds for an uplifting, gentle reflection on the human condition.’ – Joe Duffy, Irish Mail on Sunday
'Clarke's poetry is word perfect. Like Heaney, she is a deceptively tough poet... Clarke writes about nature from the inside.’ – Kevin Higgins, Galway Advertiser
'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 Ní Chuilleanáin, Dublin Review of Books
‘These beautiful poems about Clarke’s farming family and her childhood in the west of Ireland live on the table by my bed. The battered pages show that I love these poems, and read them again and again. They are gentle, understated, and capture rural people that our world tends to ignore.’ – James Rebanks, The Week, Best Books [on The River]
