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    Jane Tyson Clement

    JaneTysonClement
    Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) was a poet, author, and playwright.  Read Full Biography

    Clement grew up in Manhattan and, though she lived there until she was nineteen, she was never truly at home in the city 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 her to God, though first through disillusionment and confusion. In 1954, the Clements joined 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.

    As a writer and poet, Clement has been compared with Denise Levertov, Wendell Berry, and Jane Kenyon. Her poems are collected in The Heart’s Necessities, No One Can Stem the Tide, and some of her best short stories in The Secret Flower

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    Plough is the publishing house of the Bruderhof, an international community of people seeking to follow Jesus together. Members of the Bruderhof are committed to a way of radical discipleship in the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Inspired by the first church in Jerusalem, they renounce private property and share everything in common in a life of service to God, one another, and neighbors near and far. Learn more or arrange a visit.