My father, asleep, far out at seawith his tiller fixed to a course,sailed into a sleeping whalewho gently submerged,chose not to thrash her tailor scupper the homemade boat.
Under Sail
Jane Robinson
Feature Date
- September 2, 2020
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Excerpt from “Journey to the Sleeping Whale”
Salmon Poetry, County Clare, Ireland
Copyright © 2019 by Jane Robinson
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission
Jane Robinson‘s Journey to the Sleeping Whale (Salmon, 2018) received the Shine-Strong Award for Ireland’s best début poetry collection of the year. Her poems have also won the Strokestown International Poetry Award, 2014; the Red Line Book Festival Poetry Prize, 2015; second for Patrick Kavanagh Award, 2015; and runner-up for the 2019 Gingko Ecopoetry Award.
An Irish poet based in Dublin, Jane has a B.A. from Trinity College Dublin, a Ph.D in Biology from the California Institute of Technology, and worked as a Research Professor at the University of Arizona for ten years before returning home to Ireland.
Her recorded readings have been broadcast on RTÉ’s Lyric FM, the Poetry Jukebox, and on the RTÉ Poetry Programme where she was interviewed by Olivia O’Leary. She was the Irish Writers Centre’s 2019 Writer in Residence in Norway as well as 2019 Poet in Residence at the Archive of the National Centre for Biological Sciences in Bangalore, India. Recent and forthcoming projects include: a study of Donegal poet Madge Herron; a poetry film Orchard Diary of our Undoing; and a poem sequence ‘For the Atoll’ in collaboration with musician/composer Malachy Robinson with support from DLR Arts Office and Creative Ireland.
Find more information at http://janerobinson.ie/
County Clare
Ireland
"Jane Robinson is a poet of serious intent. More importantly she is a poet with enough range and depth of imagination and technique to give expression to that intent. Her poems are firmly grounded in the physical world. This is one reason why her sometimes daring flights of the imagination seem so real, so immediate and so credible. Throughout her work the combination of observation and description is confident and authoritative and is part of the fabric of her poems, which use the language and observational power of the scientific mind to make wonderfully serious and seriously wonderful poems."
—Paddy Bushe
"Jane Robinson’s use of language is always interesting and always strong. The theme which for me comes over most forcefully – that of our wanton destruction of the natural world, including ourselves – is not only one of urgency but Robinson approaches it in ways that surprise and shock the reader to attention."
—Geraldine Mitchell
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