Falling Into Place

£8.99

Jane Routh’s Falling into Place reflects on life enriched by the land she lives with and looks after, alive to her surroundings and fellow creatures. A poet’s ear, a photographer’s eye and dirt under her fingernails make for richly textured lyrical writing, full of detail and insight, precise observation and considered recollection – all so lightly managed and with lovely flashes of humour, it is completely compelling and a joy to read. The book is set in the north west’s Forest of Bowland, an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.

There’s a quite wonderful quality of layering in the observations that make up Jane Routh’s Falling into Place, a journal or Shepherd’s Calendar in prose of a year in the Hindburn valley.It’s a quality that comes of being rooted for many years in one place, preternaturally alert to what’s going on around oneself. Jane Routh’s observations are graced with a poet’s command of language and the ability to weave particulars into memorable passages. Gilbert White and John Clare would find a great deal to delight them in these pages and quickly identify a kindred spirit in their Lancashire neighbour. —August Kleinzahler

Jane Routh remains a poet. The writing is playful; take for example ‘a quirk of woodland’. Figurative language and a keen sense of sound develop this. In ‘May’, Routh writes of the ‘Horse chestnuts out-classing everything for a couple of days before sinking back into their heavy green.’ A few lines further, Routh describes how her car ‘changes colour […] covered by an even dusting of pale yellow talcum – birch pollen.’ Routh embraces the human world within the natural world and this honesty challenges the often idealistic character of the genre. —Stride Magazine

Out Of Print

Description

Jane Routh is one of the most engaging and consistently interesting of serious poets now writing in Britain. She has published three previous books, and has won the Poetry Business Competition and been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for the best first collection. She has also received a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and taken first prize in the Academi Cardiff and the Strokestown International Poetry Competition. She contributes reviews and non-fiction to several journals. 

A former photography lecturer, Jane has lived in the Hindburn valley for forty years, planting trees and keeping geese for the last twenty.