Overview

Polly Clark's poetry inhabits a world that is strange, unsettling, and edged with danger. This retrospective of her work drawns upon her collections Kiss (2000), the T.S. Eliot Prize shortlisted Take Me with You (2005), and Farewell My Lovely (2009), plus Afterlife, a collection of new poems. Her debut, Kiss, journeys inward, exploring the self with an unflinching gaze, before Take Me with Youturns outward to question how we connect with others, with the wider world, with the unknown. In these collections, her characters, both human and animal, speak in many voices, illuminating the moments when we are most alive and most alone. Farewell My Lovely grapples with the price of survival, charting the experience of leaving one's life behind and returning as a stranger. By turns moving and darkly comic, these poems examine the ways we cling to who we were, even as certainty dissolves and the past slips beyond reach. This retrospective of her poetry opens with a magical new collection also called Afterlife in which there are no physical limits, nothing is stable and the world is distilled to its elements. The traumatic experience of rape transforms a girl into a tiger, and a tiger into a girl; a whale embraces both air and water until forced to inhabit only one by jealous fish. The poems grapple with the inexplicable nature of some experience, suggesting that we are most real in that mysterious space between living and dying. Polly Clark is an award-winning poet and novelist. Her first collection, Kiss, was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Her second, Take Me with You, a Poetry Book Society Choice, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

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Reviews

A rich and appealingly mysterious collection in which the end of youth, the birth of a child and the strangeness of marriage are filtered through an exact imagination, whose great strengths lie in taking nothing for granted and finding the point where the ordinary and the eternal intersect. -- Sean O'Brien * Sunday Times, on Farewell My Lovely * Clark has a gift for startling, truthful analysis, for example of the power of marriage and our vulnerability within it: ‘Its strength shocked me./ Dragged me. Reset me.’ There are resonant poems about female experience which are also searingly universal…. Throughout the poems in Farewell My Lovely ideas are anchored in the real world with recognisable images, but suddenly wrenched out of the commonplace, shocking the reader out of any complacency. These are poems you can return to again and again. I recommend that you do. -- Catherine Czerkawska * The Edinburgh Review * 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, on Take Me with You * 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 * The Guardian, on Take Me with You *

Author Information

Polly Clark was born in Canada and brought up in Scotland. She received an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry in 1997. Three collections followed from Bloodaxe: the first, Kiss (2000), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; her second, Take Me with You (2005), was a Poetry Book Society Choice and shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; her third was Farewell My Lovely (2009). Her debut novel, Larchfield (Quercus, 2017), fictionalised a little-known period in the life of W.H. Auden. It won the Mslexia Prize, as well as critical plaudits from Margaret Atwood, Louis de Bernieres and Richard Ford. Her follow-up, Tiger (Quercus, 2019), was shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year. Her third novel, Ocean, was published by Eye Books in the UK and Lightning Books in the US in 2025. She divides her time between the west of Scotland and a houseboat in London.

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