Farewell My Lovely is a book of transformation in many voices, from riffs on popular songs to a modern reworking of Magnificat or Mary’s Song. Polly Clark’s vivid and unswerving gaze is applied with the same intensity to a dream of childhood, the vulnerability of a new species of bird or the fragility of marriage, creating a powerful collection about the price of survival. The book ends with a final farewell to innocence in a series of poems drawn from the Falklands War.

‘Polly Clark has mastered the necessary art of saying two things at once. The surface of her poems maintains a bright, even brisk tone; it’s full of fresh, unexpected phrasings. And yet the imagery points to a darker underbelly. It’s a poetry in which our certainties are tested and exposed as brittle’ – W.N. Herbert, PBS Bulletin

‘Take Me With You takes the subjective element and opens it into the world, in the form of strange emblematic creatures, people and places, and enters language at the most intimate and poignant of angles’ – George Szirtes, Poetry London

‘The strength of this collection lies in images so precisely right that they immediately establish the authenticity of whichever perspective is adopted. Her carefully weighted words build pictures of remarkable clarity’ – Sarah Crown, Guardian