'It is a really beautiful collection. I am moved to find all those flowers and birds so precisely placed, the farmstead nooks and crannies, the delicately nuanced explorations of big themes – the Great War, neighbourly gestures at a time of sectarian entanglement – generous pictures of [Jane Clarke's] soul-landscape, love poems. Collections of this quality are very rare.’ - Michael Longley, on A Change in the Air

‘Her verse attends so closely to the land and the people of her rural homeland that it makes us attend more closely to our own. This summer she published A Change in the Air, a collection that glides gently from caring for her mother to remembering the Troubles to moving into a new house in the countryside.’ – Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book Club newsletter

'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)

‘The delight and haunting memorability of the elegies that open her excellent third book of poems, A Change in the Air, can partly be explained by an ability to turn moments of steady objectivity into disclosures of emotion and insight … Clarke finds an archetypal purpose for her timely preoccupations, and local points of crossover between ordinary and extraordinary experience.  In this clear-flowing book, she seeks to get whole valleys onto the page, and to dwell in elemental magic, and she deserves to be celebrated for it.’ - Martin Dyar, Poetry Ireland Review

‘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

‘… 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

"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

'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, speaking on RTE Radio 1's Arena (Poetry books of 2019)

‘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)

‘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)

‘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

'A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke is a collection that deals with contemporary and historic rural life in Ireland, in particular its crafts and traditions. Set against accounts of queer love in a changing Ireland, these poems are musical, moving and true; each word chosen with deep care, each phrase made with a craftswoman’s precision.' - Jessica Traynor, on behalf of the Forward Prize 2023 Judges

‘A Change in the Air, Jane Clarke’s third collection, is a quiet, stoical meditation on fragility and mortality. Humanity takes its place within the rhythms of a natural world built on acceptance, community, and renewal. The title promises the best kind of revolution: freshness and wholesomeness – and the poems which follow deliver on this … In Jane Clarke’s hands, clarity, purity and strength speak for themselves. Her words are weighed and used sparingly. They take your breath away.’ – John Field, T S Eliot Prize reviewer

‘Her delicacy of expression, her minutely-observed descriptions, her almost teasing understatements, all bring delight ... Clarke appears to relish the opportunity to draw with a fine pencil, as she offers precise descriptions of ordinary events and experiences.’ - Alwyn Marriage, London Grip, on A Change in the Air

'The title of Jane Clarke’s A Change in the Air rather neatly conjures the country dweller’s sensitivity to the slightest shift in the weather, literal or figurative, meteorological or emotional. Though she may be influenced by Patrick Kavanagh, by Ted Hughes, and by Alice Oswald, Jane Clarke manages to plow her own furrow in poems of farm and family life that are notable for their attentiveness to, and delight in, the telling detail.' – Paul Muldoon (with Sasha Dugdale and Denise Saul), T.S. Eliot Prize 2023 judges

‘Gliding us through Irish life, history and landscape down to the last drop of dew, Clarke’s language is spare and purged of stylistic ornamentation. Her poetic power is drawn from her carefully selected material, from which no shade of quality escapes her vision.’ – Emily Driver, Era Journal

‘Irish poets featured so strongly on the T S Eliot Prize [2023] shortlist. Jane Clarke’s A Change in the Air was published by Bloodaxe in 2023, that made the list; a collection which displays an impressive, pared back emotional restraint, precise observations of the natural world, and an exploration of how people and landscapes, the voices of the past and the present, can affect our lives – all traits evident in her two previous collections The River and When the Tree Falls, both Bloodaxe Books as well.’ – Enda Wylie speaking on Books for Breakfast about A Change in the Air

'Critical to Clarke’s celebrated third collection, A Change in the Air, is how land bears witness to history. Shortlisted, at the time of writing, for this year’s T.S. Eliot Prize, Forward Prize for Best Collection and longlisted for the Laurel Prize, the politics seep through like water in a bog. The voice avoids the rant and is more seductive and convincing for it.' – Lisa Kelly, Magma

 'Jane Clarke is a revelation. Her poems are concise, often in elegant honed couplets and triolets – perfectly shaped, deftly crafted, well controlled and tempered – and her line endings are masterful, holding the moment in a breath before releasing the connecting thought.' – Maggie Mackay, The Friday Poem, on A Change in the Air

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 been shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, shortlisted for the Pigott Poetry Prize, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Farmgate Café 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 (2023). 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 the T.S. Eliot Prize 2023.

    10     After
    11     Butter for Queens
    12     Raspberries
    13     District Nurse
    14     Dressing My Mother for Her Grandson’s Wedding
    15     Given
    16     Becoming
    17     All the horses she’s ever loved
    18     Eggs
    19     All she needed
    20     Milk
    21     The Lookout
    22     The Arch

PIT PONIES OF GLENASAN
    25     Christmas Morning
    26     Pit Ponies of Glendasan
    27     The Pay
    28     Mullacor

WHEN ALL THIS IS OVER
    31     September 1914
    32     In the dugout
    33     The Game
    34     After we’re gone
    35     Bouchavesnes
    36     Priam of Troy
    37     Ling
    38     When all this is over
    39     Snow
    40     Pianist

YOU COULD SAY IT BEGINS
    42     You could say it begins
    44     Crossings
    45     Flight
    47     Family Bible
    48     When the sun

    51     The Dipper
    52     Lazy Beds
    53     skein
    54     Passage
    55     Wildfire
    56     Rowan
    57     Refuge
    58     Recipe for a bog
    59     spawn
    60     At Purteen Harbour
    61     Little Tern Colony, Kilcoole

    63     Mater Misericordiae
    64     The Key
    65     Spalls
    66     Her first
    67     Wife
    68     Ballinabarney
    69     First Earlies
    70     Shepherd
    71     Fences
    72     Thief in April
    73     Stepping in
    74     June

    76     Notes
    78     Acknowledgements