Patricia M Osborne

I’m delighted to introduce poet, Jane Dougherty, to Patricia’s Pen. Jane has recently published night horses. Find out more about Jane’s poetry and her latest collection.

night horses

Jane Dougherty

First I’d like to thank Patricia for inviting me to write something about what I do and why I do it. The occasion is the publication of my third poetry collection, night horses.

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My first published poem, a poem about fog, was in the school magazine when I was eleven. I still remember the opening, and being irritated that the word ‘footfall’ had been changed to ‘football’ by some sixth form editor with the poetic sensitivity of a clam. I have never stopped writing poetry. My dad was a poet, published in literary journals, but essentially a poet who wrote, read his poems aloud to whoever wanted to listen, and didn’t care about finding an audience. I grew up with the idea that poetry, writing in general, was something that everyone did, just because. I still do really.

Six years ago we moved from the centre of Bordeaux to a very old, very uncomfortable tenant farmer’s cottage in a rural region of the south west. It sits on the side of a valley in two hectares of meadow that used to be pasture for four cows, with a vine, vegetable garden, fruit trees and a few pigs. After the last couple to live here grew too old to cope with livestock, the place gradually went back to nature. The proximity of nature and what it does if it’s left alone has been a revelation to me, given me a different and deeper perspective on my place in the world and the long path from past to future, where I come from. The quiet, the birds, trees, little rivers, the Garonne over the hill, have become my very circumscribed world, but far richer than anything I knew in the city.

In my poetry, I try to describe what I see and hear, to put it in the context of the bigger picture of destruction of the environment, changing weather patterns, fluctuations in the wild populations. It’s sensorial, emotional, and I hope, limpid. The quality I most value in poetry is beauty, words strung together to create something simply beautiful and beautifully simple. For me, a poem with no pearl at its heart is an unreconstructed clam.

The leitmotif for this collection is the night, terrible and tender, its voices and its silences, the remnants that linger in deep pools and dark places, the hush that follows the ferment of daylight, and the horses that gallop and graze the great starry plain that stretches from dusk to dawn.

I write ferociously, and as well as a mountain of unpublished poems, I have an even bigger mountain of unpublished novels. I have one coming out with Northodox Press next year, but that’s another story.

About Jane Dougherty

Pushcart Prize nominee, Jane Dougherty’s poetry has appeared in publications including Gleam, Ogham Stone, Black Bough Poetry and The Storms Journal. Her short stories have been published in Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, Prairie Fire, Lucent Dreaming among others, and her first adult novel will be published in 2025 by Northodox Press. She lives in southwest France and has published three collections of poetry, thicker than water, birds and other feathers and night horses.

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