Clare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnsons all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets. These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poets own everyday life from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages.
Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the Poetess over time, there are also poems about writers lives sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.
Whether imagining a three-martini afternoon at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the books long, closing poem, Clare Pollards playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.
Arvustused
Pollards is a gritty reality, but one grounded with a culturally aware, geographically various, and historically wide-ranging sensibility: there are versions of creation myths, fairy tales, mystic poems, and laments for lost contemporaries clear-eyed, intelligent questioning of what the world today offers our children, our future(s). -- Heidi Williamson * The Poetry School * Since her late teens, Clare Pollard has kept her poetic finger on the pulse of the world, writing poems of fierce love about the full scope of contemporary life from the intimacy of motherhood and the divided streets of London to elegies for the victims of honour killings and the climate crisis. Wonderfully skilled and with a rare lyrical gift, her poems ask today the questions the rest of us will ask tomorrow. -- Owen Sheers * National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase, 2020 * Her work really is emphatically of our time, capturing the world in its beauties and horrors in writing thats technically superb, but which also has what, if I was a sentimental chap, Id call heart. -- Ian McMillan * The Verb *
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe: The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), which she wrote while still at school; Bedtime (2002); Look, Clare! Look! (2005); Changeling (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Incarnation (2017). Her pamphlet The Lives of the Female Poets was published by Bad Betty Press in 2019. A full-length collection her sixth Lives of the Female Poets, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.
Her translation Ovid's Heroines was published by Bloodaxe in 2013. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premièred at the Royal Court Theatre. She works as an editor, broadcaster and teacher. Her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. She is co-editor, with James Byrne, of the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), and translator (with Maxamed Xasan Alto and Said Jama Hussein) of Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf's The Sea-Migrations (Somali title: Tahriib), published by Bloodaxe Books in 2017 with The Poetry Translation Centre. Her non-fiction book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind our Picture Books was published by Fig Tree in 2019. Her debut novel Delphi (Fig Tree, 2022; Avid Reader, US, 2022) has been translated into German, Dutch and Spanish. This was followed by a second novel for adults, The Modern Fairies, from Fig Tree in 2024. Her illustrated book for children, The Untameables, was published by The Emma Press in 2024. She won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize in 2025 for The Modern Fairies, an award given to works that combine storytelling fiction and non-fiction in original ways, encompassing a range of artistic genres, disciplines, cultures and subjects.
Clare Pollard was Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2017 to 2022 and was appointed Artistic Director of the Winchester Poetry Festival in 2022. Her poem 'Pollen' first published in Bad Lilies was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2022. In 2024 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
