Ciarán O’Rourke writes: Just over a decade ago, Jane Clarke was a little-known newcomer to the Irish poetry scene. Today she is one of its most dependable talents. She is studious and industrious, a crafter of gleaming songlines with clipped, shimmering rectangles of illumination on the page. Her new book, Coracle, is a gathering up of style and strength.

Although Clarke is known for her tender pastorals and riverine memory-poems, tracing the evanescences of time and nature, what distinguishes her work is its hinted menace and edge of anger. ‘The hand that signed the paper felled a city,’ Dylan Thomas contended. Clarke personalises this perception, adding to its eerie disquiet an intimacy that Thomas’s portentous address had arguably lacked. Thinking of the Rhode Island Red chickens that roamed her parents’ farmyard with ‘flamenco flounces’ in her youth, she recalls ‘the first time / I saw my mother choose one / and with deft wrist, wring its neck’, continuing:

That night she plumped my pillows,
smoothed my sheets,
stroked the hair from my brow.

Maternal care and a deft, pragmatic lethality are acknowledged, in retrospect, as mutually contiguous – fugal variations, each of the other.

The central sequence of poems in her third collection, A Change in the Air, likewise tallies the risks borne and rhythms perfected by lead miners and their accompanying ponies in Wicklow: a dangerous, extractive operation in a landscape as idyllic to look at as it was (for stretches of its history) difficult, materially, to live in. The men, ‘all black eyes and bruises / from fist fights at the brothel door’, return to the mine out of necessity. ‘I’m hard of hearing, half-crippled, / hands fissured as schist’, reads one segment, in the voice of an aged miner, ‘and still my heart lifts to see / morning mist veiling Tonelagee.’ At its most engaging, Clarke’s is a shadowy music, silted and gritty.

Perhaps chiming with fellow troubadour Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s Hymn to All the Restless Girls, Clarke’s work turns to myth and chronicle as a means of honing an instinctively tough – and yet celebratory – feminist perspective. Coracle thus pays tribute to Anna Parnell, land agitator and liberationist, as well as Brigid, Celtic goddess and pilgrim saint, ‘who quit her father’s domain / and took to the rutted roads’:

Washerwomen, scullery girls,
spinners and weavers:
all walked in Brigid’s footsteps
and couldn’t be called back home.

As the movement for Repeal metamorphoses into an official memory, rather than the active political force it once was, and as levels of femicide and violence against women continue to rise, Clarke’s melodic re-imaginings of now-vanished women who dared and sought and suffered – all ‘the ruckus they made’ – take on a moral weight, anchoring the luminosities they otherwise reach for. Much of her work, it might be said, occurs in a daylight made clearer by carried understanding, as though each recollection described, and recovered, had previously been lost to life, escaped ‘through a gap / in the blackthorn hedge / to the circle of stones / where no wind ever blows’. A recent piece dedicated to the late Shirley McClure closes with a simplicity that sears, soft with grief:

I wished to get closer
but she banked west,
tipped herself
effortless into the wind.

Mother Earth, custodian of ‘corn buntings / feasting in the stubble, bitterns / roosting in reedbeds’ (both extinct in Ireland), is also a recurring muse. Clarke must be one of the few Irish poets who can write of bogland (‘a meadow of cotton-grass’ and ‘sphagnum moss’) without sounding imaginatively burdened by the earlier Heaney mode. Her ‘Recipe for a Bog’ includes the injunction, at once gentle and wryly revisionist, to attune oneself to the ‘spider trapped / on sundew tendrils’ and to the ‘wingbeat, wingbeat, glide’ of ‘low-flying merlin’ – peatland beheld not as fuel or preserving receptacle to human lives, but a living organism and habitat. In this Clarke’s poetry bears a resemblance to the field-worked verse-visions of Kathleen Jamie and Gillian Clarke – praise-singers impelled by sharp-weathered rituals and resurfaced revelations. ‘There will come magpies, foxes, / badgers, stoats’ dangerous creatures, Clarke notes, and yet the ‘mottle-brown blackbird’ will lay ‘her heart in the basket boat’ (Moya Cannon and Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill are choral precursors here as well).

For all that, we may experience occasional prickles of hesitation on the journey Clarke charts. In an otherwise positive response to her debut, published in The Dublin Review of Books, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin took issue with the ‘tight packaging’ and the ‘influence of workshop culture’ on the poems. Three collections on, the same reservations might be voiced. In a curious way Clarke’s undisputed dexterity as a wordsmith can seem at times too cleanly, and uncritically, attached to established modes and manners – as if the nostalgic, rural reminiscence, or the commemorative lyric that won Michael Longley plaudits (and some kind of dominance over the British poetry market) twenty years ago could be endlessly recreated, with the odd sprinkling of private experience to ‘make it new’. In moments her elegant bucolics appear almost to have arrived by conveyor-belt – products of a cottage industry scaled up for international consumption.

At a point when poets as far-flung as Derek Mahon and Mary O’Malley have depicted an Ireland in thrall to big tech and big pharma, a battle site in the climate wars and feeding-ground for corporate interests, Clarke can be relied on, by contrast, to conjure – repeatedly – a cattle-hill country of trilling hedgerows and lambently turning seasons, or to memorialise the unknown (and ideology-free) trench-soldier of the first World War, ‘naming the flowers in his mother’s garden: / foxgloves, peonies, lupins, heart’s ease’. Surely even Carol Ann Duffy must envy such engineered mellifluousness. At any rate, Clarke’s proficiency for making her commissioned works tuneful and vivid is both a strength – who else could manage it? – and a limitation. (Clarke is unusual, and impeccably balanced, in having written elegiac tributes for women and men on seemingly every side of the Irish and British wars fought in the decade after 1914 – royalist, Redmondite, insurgent, suffragette, pacifist, partitionist, adventurist, etc – as though her secret credo were really Shelley’s, that ‘Great and mean / meet massed in death, who lends what life must borrow’.)

The truth is that Clarke, as a writer, is intent and perceptive enough to absorb any criticism she wishes, while leaving the rest behind as she continues to map and tread her own trail. Coracle is a fine collection, confirming what many readers have already sensed: fluently crafted, grounded yet lyrical, her love-drawn lines stream with a rare brightness – a music that sings.