‘Across the Line’ – launch of Jane Clarke’s and Maura Dooley’s new poetry collections

Thank you to all who attended in person and virtually on June 15, and a very big and special thank you to poet Wendy French, who managed the Zoom session splendidly, poet Sarah Westcott who stood by to liaise between Wendy and us at the Library, and as always to Debra and the Library staff, Katherine and David in particular, who are helpful and generous way beyond the call of duty.

A few members of the audience , both in person and on Zoom, asked me about a brief quotation I read at the end of this engaging, moving, lively and thoroughly enjoyable event, so here it is. It comes, appropriately, from a book called This is Happiness, by, also appropriately, the Irish author Niall Williams:

It seems to me the quality that makes any book, music, painting worthwhile is life, just that. Books, music, painting are not life, can never be as full, rich, complex, surprising or beautiful, but the best of them can catch an echo of that, can turn you back to look out the window, go out the door aware that you’ve been enriched, that you have been in the company of something alive that has caused you to realise once again how astonishing life is […]

Rarely more true than our experience of listening to these two beautiful, different and complementary voices. Nostalgia, loss and love – for Nature, family, the changing world. Never sentimental, often witty, even sharp and always word-perfect. The moment of anticipation before something changes, or starts (or doesn’t) was a common theme in both collections, A Change in the Air (Jane’s) and Five Fifty-Five (Maura’s) – both with Bloodaxe Books, 2023.

Too many times I have felt that poets rush a little while reading in front of an audience. It did not happen with Maura and Jane. We, the 50 or so in the audience at the Library and the 17 on Zoom, knew and appreciated that moment of anticipation, that short intake of breath before the next poem, and were richly rewarded.

It is hard to ‘review’ an evening of such profound, musical and thought provoking works, with perfect sense of place and time and so beautifully read.

A member of the audience sent me these lovely comments:

Jane Clarke and Maura Dooley shared their unique poetry in beautifully lyrical and musical tones that captured images and characters so well in one’s mind and imagination. The opportunity for Q&As was much appreciated and the poets’ reply over the best conditions for writing poetry … ‘carry a notebook to write down ideas and be aware of those snagging moments that prick the mind and can germinate into seeds for later poetic inspiration…’

If anyone would like to add their thoughts on the poems and the poets, do send them to irena@in-words.co.uk. I would love to add your words to mine… Thank you.

If you want to buy a signed copy of A Change in the Air or of Jane’s earlier collections please contact Jane Clarke directly, details on www.janeclarkepoetry.ie

For Maura’s Five Fifty-Five and many other collections you can contact her via M.Dooley@gold.ac.uk .

Jane Clarke is the author of two poetry collections, The River and When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books 2015 & 2019), as well as an illustrated chapbook, All the Way Home (Smith|Doorstop 2019), which she launched at West Greenwich Library in 2019, introduced by Blake Morrison. This book was her response to a collection of family letters and photographs held at the Mary Evans Picture Library in Blackheath. Her third collection, A Change in the Air is published by Bloodaxe Books in May 2023. Her Greenwich reading is the only in-person launch, and she is travelling from Ireland to be with us. Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2022 Ireland Chair of Poetry Travel Award. The River was the first poetry book to be shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize in 2016 and When the Tree Falls was shortlisted for three Irish poetry prizes and longlisted for the Ondaatje Prize in 2020. She grew up on a farm in the west of Ireland and now lives with her wife in the uplands of Co. Wicklow.
www.janeclarkepoetry.ie

Maura Dooley is a Professor of Creative Writing at Goldsmiths College, University of London and has directed the MA in Creative and Life Writing there since its inception. Maura’s family background in Ireland and Wales has long been central to her work. Kissing a Bone and her later collection Life Under Water, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation in 2008, were both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Her poem ‘Cleaning Jim Dine’s Heart’ was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem in 2015, and was included in her collection, The Silvering (2016), also a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Maura’s most recent collection, published in April 2023, is Five Fifty-Five (Bloodaxe). Anthologies she has edited include The Honey Gatherers: Love Poems and How Novelists Work. Her translation (with Elhum Shakerifar) of the exiled Iranian poet Azita Ghahreman’s Negative of a Group Photograph (Farsi title: نگاتیو یک عکس دسته جمعی) was published by Bloodaxe Books with the Poetry Translation Centre in 2018. It received an English PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation 2019. Maura is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Events

Tuesday May 14, 7pm on Zoom:

Voices from the Blog – in collaboration with Mary Evans Picture Library.

Readings by Natan Barreto, David Bottomley, Wendy French, Sue Hubbard, Maggie MacKay, Marion McCready, Hugh McMillan and Jill Sharp.

Remembering Gill Stoker.

A great line-up for this small tribute to Gill, who founded and curated the Poems and Pictures Blog for the Picture Library, attracting and encouraging poets to ‘match’ poems with pictures from the Library’s huge collection.

Gill and I collaborated on a number of events in the past, both virtual and in person, and I hope to use this format a few more times – there are so many poets who want to celebrate Gill and her achievement (one of many). She was so helpful, enthusiastic, talented and knowledgeable, and we miss her terribly.

If you wish to attend the reading, please email me, irena@in-words.co.uk, and I will send you a Zoom invitation, as well as further information, nearer the time.

Natan Barreto was born in Salvador, Brazil. He has lived in Rio, Paris, Rome, and, since 1992, in London, where he works as a primary school teacher. He is the author of seven collections of poetry in Portuguese. Fluent in many languages, he has also published a novel and a volume of translations from French of work by Madagascan writer Jean-Joseph Rabearivel.

David Bottomley is an award-winning poet, playwright and librettist with a passion for environmental and ecological conservation. His play Waterton’s Wild Menagerie was a finalist of the Nick Darke Award; Britain for Breakfast, finalist Enter Stage Write Award and Limboland, finalist at Herts and Essex Playwriting Festival. His plays have been performed at Edinburgh, Manchester, San Diego Fringe Festivals, Birmingham and London theatres. He works nationally and internationally with composers to set his writing to music. He was commissioned by the charity Rising Tides to write the environmental play King Neptune and the Mermaid. David recently obtained an MA in Opera Making and Writing at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, for which he was commissioned to write the opera Lanternfish.

Wendy French has three collections of poetry published: Splintering the Dark (Rockingham Press, 2005), surely you know this (Tall Lighthouse, 2009), and Thinks Itself A Hawk (Hippocrates Press, 2016), the latter resulting from her time as Poet in Residence at the UCH Macmillan Cancer Centre, 2014-2015. She was joint editor with Dilys Wood of Fanfare (Second Light, 2015), a book of poems written by women poets, and also co-edited The Hippocrates Book of the Heart (Hippocrates Press, 2017) with Prof Michael Hulse and Prof Donald Singer. She won the Hippocrates Poetry and Medicine Prize (NHS section) in 2010 and was awarded second prize in 2011. Her collaboration with Jane Kirwan resulted in the book Born in the NHS (Hippocrates Press, 2013). She has judged or co-judged three major poetry competitions: the Torbay International Competition, the Torriano Competition and the Tongues and Grooves 10-year celebration competition, as well as the Hippocrates International Poetry Competition for poems relating to medicine or the body. For the past twenty years she has facilitated creative writing in healthcare settings, having finished her formal teaching career as head of the Maudsley and Bethlem Hospital School in 2003.

Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic, with an MA in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. She is twice winner of the London Writers Competition, with a third prize in the National Poetry Competition. Her publications include Everything Begins with the Skin (Enitharmon), Ghost Station, The Forgetting and Remembering of Air (Salt), and The Idea of Islands (Occasional Press). Swimming to Albania, her fourth collection, was published by Salmon Press in 2021, and Pushkin Press published her fourth novel Flatlands in 2023. Twenty of her poems were included in An Anthology: Carcanet 2000. Her poetry has been recorded for The Poetry Sound Archive, read on Poetry Please, The Verb and Front Row, and appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, as well as in The Irish Times and The Observer. She has published a collection of short stories, Rothko’s Red (Salt), and two novels, Depth of Field (Dewi Lewis) and Girl in White (Cinnamon Press), for which she received a major Arts Council Award. Her third novel, Rainsongs, was published in 2018 to great critical acclaim from The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Irish Independent and The Jewish Chronicle, among many others. As an art critic she has written regularly for many leading newspapers and art magazines. Her selected art writings, Adventures in Art, are published by Other Criteria. As The Poetry Society’s only Public Art Poet, she was responsible for London’s largest public art poem, ‘Eurydice’, in the IMAX tunnel at Waterloo, commissioned as part of the South Bank regeneration.

A retired Scottish support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie MacKay took up her writing again and began a thrilling new life. After studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, her pamphlet The Heart of the Run (Picaroon Poetry 2018) with Kate Garrett was followed by her debut collection A West Coast Psalter (Kelsey Books 2021). In 2020 her poem ‘How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt’ was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s WordView permanent collection and was a runner up in The Liverpool Prize. Steve Cawte at Impspired Press published her second collection The Babel of Human Travel in November 2022. She reviews poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem (https://thefridaypoem.com). Maggie loves a good malt and cool jazz as much as daydreaming on the sofa with Hattie, her marvellous rescue greyhound.

Marion McCready lives in Argyll. Her poems have been published widely including in Poetry (Chicago), Edinburgh Review, The Glasgow Herald and have appeared in multiple anthologies. Her pamphlet collection Vintage Sea was published by Calder Wood Press (2011). She is the winner of a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award and the Melita Hume Poetry Prize and the author of two poetry collections from Eyewear Publishing: Tree Language (2014) and Madame Ecosse (2017). Her most recent collection, Look to the Crocus, was published by Shoestring Press in 2023.

Hugh McMillan is a well published, anthologised and broadcast poet, writer and performer who lives in South West Scotland. His last collection Haphazardly in the Starless Night was published by Luath Press in 2021 and Diverted to Split, his latest, is due out in summer 2024. In 2021 he was appointed editor of the Scottish Poetry Library’s anthology ‘Best Scottish Poems’ and was also chosen to be a Saltire Society judge for Best Scottish Poetry Collection of the Year. His cult classic ‘McMillan’s Galloway’ was reprinted in paperback form in May 2023, and ‘Whit If’, his Scottish History poems are to be reprinted in April 2024. His website is at https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/

Jill Sharp has worked as a tutor with the Open University and has also taught excluded teenagers. Her poetry has been published in many magazines including Acumen, Envoi, The Frogmore Papers, The Interpreter’s House, Mslexia, Prole, Poetry Salzburg Review, Stand, and Under the Radar. Her work has also appeared in various anthologies, most recently Pale Fire (Frogmore Press) and Contemporary Gothic Verse (Emma Press), as well as online at And Other Poems, Ink, Sweat and Tears and London Grip. Her pamphlet Ye gods was published by Indigo Dreams (2015), and she was one of six poets in Vindication, an anthology from Arachne Press (2018). Her poem ‘Cemetery crow’ was placed joint-second in the 2020 Keats-Shelley Prize. Jill was a founder member of Swindon’s BlueGate Poets, and she has run regular writing workshops at the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate.