Jane Kirwan’s poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies in Great Britain and the Czech Republic where she lives half of the year. Her poetry collections Stealing the Eiffel Tower (1997) and The Man Who Sold Mirrors (2003) and Second Exile (poems and prose with Aleš Macháček ) were published by Rockingham Press and a Czech version Druhy Exil in 2011 by Novela Bohemica.
 
She won an Arts Council Writers’ Award in 2002, has been commended and won prizes in several competitions including the National and Hippocrates, has read at poetry festivals in the UK and abroad. In May 2013 Hippocrates Press published Born in the NHS, an A-Z of poetry, prose, memoir and facts written with Wendy French, ‘conceived’ when they were talking about the threats to the NHS. She published a novel Don’t Mention Her through Blue Door Press in 2016 as well as a poetry collection Stories & Lies with Pamela Johnson and Jennifer Grigg in 2018.
 
Her latest collection The Goose Woman was published by Blue Door Press in February 2019.
 
 
Comment on Jane’s work:
 

Stealing the Eiffel Tower

penetrating eye and the simple yet melancholic tone of her fearlessness… In all, a fierce witnessing of our human foibles.

 

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

 
 

She’s an acute observer of her subject, understands the evasiveness, inconsistency, absurdity… stirs, puzzles, seduces… a fine, exciting, feet-off-the-ground poet.

 

R.V. Bailey, Envoi

 
 

exceptionally honest

 

Jane Holland, Poetry Review

 
 

The Man Who Sold Mirrors

… vividly registers an all-pervasive childhood Catholicism through powerful writing… a distinctive muscular style to combine with her fascination with the clash of European cultures…

 

Martyn Crucefix, Poetry London

 
 

… develops a sense of strangeness, of disjuncture, out of an action as simple as opening a packet of coffee… At the other end of the spectrum, she looks for comprehensible metaphors for cultural enormities, and, as she must, only compounds the confusion and terror through imagination…
 
a powerfully imaginative, engaged book, which ought to be required reading for Home Secretaries who think that exile is a soft option.

 

Phil Simmons, Acumen

 
 

There is a copious imagination at work here, something decidedly European in its mixture of romantic sensuality and intellect.

 

George Szirtes