No One Can Stem the Tide
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€16.99
Though most of Jane Tyson Clement’s poems remained hidden in private notebooks during her lifetime, the few that traveled beyond her hands were widely admired and drew critical acclaim. Now, with this first comprehensive anthology of her work, the public can at last discover this gifted poet and give her the audience she deserves.
Evoking comparisons to such better-known contemporaries as Jane Kenyon, Wendell Berry, and Denise Levertov, Clement is direct and understated. Even when technically sophisticated, her poetry speaks with a familiar voice and draws on accessible images from the natural world.
Still, these are no mere “nature poems.” In exploring the varied emotions of life – of love, longing, and loss; memory, sacrifice, and desire; struggle and frustration, joy and resolve – they reveal the tireless seeking of a generous and honest heart and beckon the reader down new avenues of seeing and hearing.
Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) was a poet, teacher, writer, and mother of seven. Born to Quaker parents, she grew up in Manhattan. Though she lived there until she was nineteen, she was never truly at home in the city but preferred Bay Head, New Jersey, where the family owned a summer house. Bay Head’s windswept shore drew Jane back year after year: “There was something eternal about it that was always a rock and an anchor for me.” Jane graduated from Smith College in 1939. Still, she yearned to move beyond the “frivolous, self-centered side of my nature…and to do something – anything – about the unfair treatment of workers, the hoarding of wealth in the hands of a few.” Eventually this search led her to God, though first through disillusionment and confusion. In 1954, Jane and her husband, Bob, joined the Bruderhof, a community movement dedicated to practicing Jesus’ teachings of nonviolence, economic equality, and social justice.