Clare Pollard

Clare Pollard cocks a snook at Dr Johnson’s 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 poet’s 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 book’s long, closing poem, Clare Pollard’s playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.

'Taking its name – and project – from Samuel Johnson’s 1781 all-male Lives of the Poets, Pollard’s Lives of the Female Poets pays tribute to the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Forough Farrokhzād, Praxilla, Emily Brontë and Wanda Coleman, juxtaposing poetic history with scenes from her own contemporary life as a female poet.[...] In establishing a tradition of women and women’s (written) work, Pollard elevates women’s work and lives (embodied, messy, meaty, boozy) to being worthy of poetry.' – Ellora Sutton, Mslexia

'Pollard’s latest collection spans the breadth of human creativity and creation. It’s at once a joyous tribute to some of history’s greatest female poets and to the smaller things that make a life – like cocktails, and head lice. These poems are physical and playful, bold yet delicate as we’re swept along by references and allusions that dance off the page. It’s poetry at its most confident. In the crescendoing titular poem Pollard’s “saintly Poetess” deservedly finds her place in the canon she’s honouring.' – Nasim Rebecca Asl, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025

‘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 on Clare Pollard, one of the ten writers 'asking questions to shape our future' he selected for the National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase in 2020.

‘In Clare Pollard’s fifth poetry collection Incarnation, she writes of pregnancy and mothers and children, of fairytales and news headlines and horrors. The follow-up to her 2013 reimagining of Ovid’s Heroines with its emphasis on the possibilities (and necessities) of revising old stories, Pollard’s poems remain sharp and compelling.’ – Rosalind Jana, Stylist Magazine

‘Motherhood is one of the themes in Clare Pollard’s new collection; but the book also broadens out into forceful and compassionate poems about the sorrows of the world into which our children are born… Incarnation is a book which, from the very first poem, can startle the reader with its vivid and muscular language and bold imagery.’ – Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, London Grip

‘There are some stunningly powerful pieces in this collection on the theme of children and our relationships with them.  Poems about pregnancy and childbirth are viscerally real… This – male – reviewer was captivated and moved throughout by the power of these poems.  An outstandingly effective collection.’ – Frank Startup, The School Librarian

‘... out this month is the poet Clare Pollard’s Incarnation, a meditation on pregnancy, children and storytelling... Pollard digs fearlessly into maternal anxieties, and the physical wonder of reproduction.’ – Charlotte Runcie, The Daily Telegraph

‘Pollard’s 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

‘Her work really is emphatically of our time, capturing the world in its beauties and horrors in writing that’s technically superb, but which also has what, if I was a sentimental chap, I’d call heart.’ – Ian McMillan, The Verb

Clare Pollard reads from Changeling

Clare Pollard reads four poems from her Bloodaxe collection Changeling and talks about the book's themes. The poems are 'Tam Lin's Wife', 'Pendle', 'The Two Ravens' and 'The Caravan'. Neil Astley filmed Clare Pollard at her home in London in June 2011.

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