Heart’s Necessities

Poet and short story writer Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) lived in Manhattan until she was nineteen, but preferred Bay Head, New Jersey, where the family owned a summer house. Bay Head’s windswept shore drew her back year after year: “There was something eternal about it that was always a rock and an anchor for me.” She graduated from Smith College in 1939, became a teacher, and married Robert Allen Clement, a Quaker attorney and fellow pacifist. Despite her privileged background, Clement was disturbed by the injustices she saw around her and yearned to do something constructive with her life, 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 Jane and her family to join the Bruderhof, a community movement dedicated to practicing Jesus’ teachings of nonviolence, economic equality, and social justice. Here Clement taught school, raised seven children, and, through her poetry and fiction, continued her search for wholeness and truth.Evoking comparisons to Edna St. Vincent Millay, Mary Oliver, Jane Kenyon, and Denise Levertov, Jane Tyson Clement’s poetry is direct and understated, drawing on familiar images from nature and daily life. Her story is told through the lens of her poetry in The Heart’s Necessities: A Life in Poetry. Many additional poems are collected in No One Can Stem the Tide, and her short stories appear in The Secret Flower and Other Stories. Veery Huleatt is an editor at Plough Quarterly and Plough Publishing House.

The poetry is brilliant, and it’s inspired Becca to write stunning music.--David Crosby