Maggie Mackay reviews A Change in the Air by Jane Clarke (Bloodaxe Books, 2023)
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. White space around the text enables the reader to breathe and relish the rhythm and assonance. The poet attributes her ear for tuning her work to the tutelage of Gillian Clarke (no relation). I listened to Jane Clarke’s recorded readings; they are hypnotic, un-rushed. Her diction is clear, matching the clarity of the poems, and her language is plain, understated, and moving.
Written over four years (including Covid lockdowns) at her home in Wicklow, A Change in the Air explores family relationships, Irish history, the First World War, and the natural world. I’m an urban creature, but many of the rural themes clicked with me. The poem ‘Shepherd’, a gentle story which tells of a life lived out on the land and in all weathers, reminds me of my great-grandfather, a tenant shepherd in Glenapp and Ballantrae. The lines of ‘Lazy Beds’ are indented to reflect the practice of building poor soil into ridges to allow subsistence farming (my ancestors at Garryhorn did the same). The collies in ‘The Lookout’ reminded me of my family’s dogs, while the lines about how an animal can teach humans what love is (“all he knew about love that waits / in the wind and rain”) reduced me to tears.
In the first section, Clarke writes about her ageing mother “in her days of gathering dusk”. The opening poem, ‘After’, uses beautiful similes to express the pain of loss felt by the widow, and to show how she’s connected to home and place. Her heart is “bent over / like larkspur after a storm”; her bones creak “like the bolt on the door of the barn.” The poem ends with quiet power. The days are always too long now her husband has died and she’s waiting “with the tired cows at the gate”. This section comprises tender and intimate pieces which show Clarke’s mother doing the mundane and domestic tasks she has done all her life – making butter, washing potatoes, cooking porridge – while quietly losing touch with reality: something “has slipped into her mind” and “like a stoat among voles, / it hunts down her memories.”
Her poems are concise, often in elegant honed couplets and triolets – perfectly shaped, deftly crafted, well controlled and tempered
Clarke also writes about her late grandmother, who taught her to collect and preserve eggs, and to knit, and to read, and whose mother “died in childbirth, / as if it was as natural as losing a ewe / on a cold winter’s night.” Again, this poem speaks to me, reminding me of the shared bed with my Gran when I visited as a child, and learning to knit and read with her. This is poignant storytelling.
In a sequence of four elegiac pieces inspired by a conversation with a former miner, Clarke draws us into the mining community to meet the much loved pit ponies, images of a bygone age and close-knit community. ‘Mullacor’ is packed with sound and beauty, the action of men and ponies striving as one, the strength of “hobnailed boots” and “iron-shod hooves” that “grind / pine needles into granite” and ends with the startling image of a single red kite drifting in the sky, “bronze as withered bracken”. There are many such cameos of observed humans and animals, and all are imbued with meaning; Clarke is master of the specific made universal.
The ten-poem sequence ‘All the way home’ responds to the Auerbach family archive of First World War photographs and letters held in the Mary Evans Picture Library, London. ‘After we’re gone’ allows a soldier to voice his melancholic perspective on the ghastliness of war. It contrasts the battlefield detritus (“coins, buttons, tin cups, / boot laces, shaving mugs, razors […] letters, / curses, men and horses”) with the beauty of the flowers in his mother’s garden: “foxgloves, peonies, lupins, heart’s ease”, and ends by focussing on home:
When I try to forget what I’ve seen
I think of my neighbours
with rakes and scythes between hedges
scented by honeysuckle and wild rose.
The fourth section, ‘You Could Say It Begins’, includes an eponymous poem tracing the geography of the Irish border (“wends upstream to Liberty Bridge, / leans south-west, bends north-east”). It considers crossings of many kinds. ‘Flight’ focusses on human fear, violence and loss. A family and their “quiet” father run for their lives from the enemy, their essentials loaded into two carts (“a can of milk, / gifts of cabbage and soda bread”):
Sure you’ll be back, they said,
when these troubles are settled.
Throughout, Clarke resists the easy polarities, the simple reading. Her emphasis is on the connections between people on different sides of a border, and the way kindness prevails in times of need. In ‘Family Bible’ it’s the great-aunt who’s the keeper of family history. On her death, the Bible is found to contain all manner of records, letters, keepsakes, souvenirs – “the births, // marriages, deaths of seven generations”. Again, what matters are common experiences and compassion. The poem ends with a note from the great-aunt: “when a child is ill, // a harvest fails or a well runs dry, / we set our differences aside.”
A Change in the Air is full of celebratory poems about the natural world – frogs, geese, seals, dippers, bogs
A Change in the Air is full of celebratory poems about the natural world – frogs, geese, seals, dippers, bogs. Clarke has a keen appreciation of the damage that’s being done to the environment. In ‘Wildfire’ the night sky “glows inferno red” and bats “shrivel as they fly”. But there’s also hope. In ‘At Purteen Harbour’, years after the basking sharks have been fished out, a school of twelve reappear and the old men cheer, “It’s as if we’ve been forgiven“.
Much of the final sequence is about Clarke’s partner. ‘The Key’ explores the sensations of a couple moving in together, making their first tentative steps. We feel the love in the beauty of “honeysuckle tangled in hazel, / oak breaking into leaf”. The cottage is claimed as home with a “sweep and scrub”. Books are placed on shelves, there’s the sound of “the Avonbeg at the end of the road”. At the end of the day, the goddess of love, Venus, “unlocks the sky”. In ‘Her first’, Clarke and her partner are married by a registrar unused to dealing with a lesbian couple. The poem radiates hope and generosity. Finally, ‘June’ marks the eve of her beloved’s birthday. The lines offer a sensory hit: “wild rose fills the garden / to the sultry-scented brim” and “hawkmoths flock to fuchsia”, and the last two couplets close the whole book with a call to love and live:
Because it’s bright till almost midnight
and the days will be short too soon,
let’s stay out here and listen
for the wood pigeon’s five-note tune.
What a stunning way to end. Let’s go back and begin again.
Maggie Mackay‘s poetry has been published in many publications and anthologies. Her pamphlet The Heart of the Run was published by Picaroon Poetry in 2018 and her collection A West Coast Psalter by Kelsay Books in 2021. The Poetry Archive WordView 2020 awarded her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ a place in the permanent collection. Her second collection, The Babel of Human Travel, was published in December 2022 by Impspired Press. She enjoys a whisky, a good jazz band, and daydreaming with her gorgeous rescue greyhound.
