Jane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place, exploring how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present show courage in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and everyday losses in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world.

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

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.