Dylan Brennan & Jane Clarke

Deeply attuned to those things that make and unmake us, Dylan Brennan’s Let The Dead concerns itself with life’s alchemical processes. A couple breathe life into a doomed poppet, a photographer immortalises a corpse, Joyce and Breton rub shoulders on the streets of the poet’s adopted Mexico, where life is a tapestry of ‘delicate anthers’ and ‘disembodied tongues’. These dark meditations are set against poems which consider love, miscarriage, childbirth and the daily miracle of family life. Beautiful and disturbing by turns, these reflections on Ireland and Mexico’s shared colonial past invoke topographies both real and imagined, where ‘things in the ground have a tendency to grow.’ Let the Dead reminds us of the power of art to shape our perception of history, and of the artist’s responsibility in a time of violence.

Jane Clarke’s third collection is far-reaching and yet precisely rooted in time and place. In luminous language her poems explore how people, landscape and culture shape us. Voices of the past and present reverberate with courage and resilience in the face of poverty, prejudice, war and exile and the everyday losses of living. Across six sequences these intimate poems of unembellished imagery accrue power and resonance in what is essentially a book of love poems to our beautiful, fragile world. A Change in the Air follows Jane Clarke’s widely praised previous collections The River (2015) and When the Tree Falls (2019).