About the Book

Silver Medal, 2020 Independent Publisher Book Awards

What are the heart’s necessities?

It’s a question Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) asked herself over and over, both in her poetry and in the way she lived. Her observation of the seasons of the soul and of the natural world have made her poems beloved to many readers, most recently singer-songwriter Becca Stevens, who has given Clement’s poetry new life – and a new audience – as lyrics in her songs. This book interweaves Clement’s best poems with the story of her life, and with commentary by Stevens describing how specific poems speak to her own life, passions, and creative process.

Like many great poets, from Emily Dickinson to Gerard Manley Hopkins, Jane Tyson Clement (1917–2000) has found more readers since her death than in her lifetime. A new generation that prizes honesty and authenticity is finding in Clement – a restless, questing soul with a life as compelling as her art – a voice that expresses their own deepest feelings, values, and desires.

Book Trailer

Praise

This beautiful homage to Jane Tyson Clement and her poetry, which will continue to resonate with readers and, through Becca Stevens’s compositions, music lovers, also celebrates the kind of artistic collaboration that spans time and opens us to our own ‘heart’s necessities.’

Booklist

The genesis of The Heart's Necessities, so well written by Becca Stevens, is a complex and interesting one. The journeys of being led from one discovery to another are very profound. Jane Tyson Clement was a wonderful poet and person … I was so interested in her and her husband’s commitment to the Bruderhof and their life in faith.

Carolyn Gelland-Frost, poet, author of Dream-Shuttle

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

David Crosby

Each of the Clement poems is a small, beautiful gem; she uses nature metaphors so simply and so adroitly that you find yourself almost stunned into silence....I’m not sure whether I would call this a book. A better description might be “a profoundly moving experience.”

Glynn Young, Tweetspeak Poetry

A gem of a book… Poetry by an obscure dead poet, but with a twist: this poet, Jane Tyson Clement, has a huge fan in jazz/indie rock musician and singer Becca Stevens, and Plough Publishing has put the two of them together. It’s an exciting book on many levels, especially when you hear the poetry put to music.

Independent Publisher Magazine

Tender, humorous, and with a light touch, Huleatt’s biography of Clement also conveys the strains to which any long marriage is subject.... The interplay between Clement’s poems and the narrative of her life kept me absorbed from beginning to end.

John Wilson, First Things Magazine

Through hard-won religious commitment, Jane Tyson Clement’s poems rose from feminine eloquence, in the manner of Edna St. Vincent Millay and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to something closer to universal:

‘Too late we break the siege
of the close-bastioned heart
and find the city starved,
dry to the bone, and dark.’

Sarah Ruden

Huleatt’s voice is captivating as she traces the history of a compassionate life lived. This moving collection on the life of a true poet is stellar. The final poem in the collection brought me to tears.

Sheryl Luna, poet, author of Pity the Drowned Horses

Tablet of Contents

Tags:
Poetry
Literature
Relationships