Delphi
Fig Tree, 2022
It is 2020 and in a time more turbulent than any of us could have ever imagined, a woman is attempting to write a book about prophecy in the ancient world.
Navigating the tightening grip of lockdown, a marriage in crisis, and a ten-year-old son who seems increasingly unreachable, she becomes fixated on our many forms of divination and prediction: on oracles, tarot cards and tea leaves and the questions we have always asked as we scroll and click and rage against our fates. But in doing so she fails to notice the future creeping into the heart of her own home. For despite our best intentions – our sacrifices and our bargains with the gods – time, certainty and, sometimes, those we love, can still slip away …
Heartbreakingly relatable and achingly funny Delphi is both a snapshot and a time capsule, deftly capturing our pasts, our presents, and how we keep on going in a world that is ever more uncertain and absurd.
The Lives of the Female Poets (Sold Out)
Bad Betty Press, 2019
Bad Betty Shots are limited edition mini-pamphlets, each containing a single long-form poem to give a concentrated hit of the author’s voice. The Lives of the Female Poets is a riveting introduction to the game-changing writers history did its best to discredit, destroy or conceal.
Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books
Fig Tree, 2019
We’ve read Green Eggs and Ham, laughed at Mr Tickle and whetted our appetites with The Very Hungry Caterpillar. But what lies behind the picture books that make up our childhood? Fierce Bad Rabbits takes us on an eye-opening journey in a pea-green boat through the history of picture books. From Edward Lear through to Beatrix Potter and contemporary picture books like Stick Man, Clare Pollard shines a light on some of our best-loved childhood stories, their histories and what they really mean. Because the best picture books are far more complex than they seem – and darker too. Monsters can gobble up children and go unnoticed, power is not always used wisely, and the wild things are closer than you think.
Sparkling with wit, magic and nostalgia, Fierce Bad Rabbits weaves in tales from Clare’s own childhood, and her re-readings as a parent, with fascinating facts and theories about the authors behind the books. Introducing you to new treasures while bringing your childhood favourites to vivid life, it will make you see even stories you’ve read a hundred times afresh.
Incarnation
Bloodaxe, 2017
The poems in Clare Pollard’s new collection Incarnation are about our children and the stories that we tell them. Whether looking at the discourse around pregnancy, describing the pain of childbirth or thinking about surveillance at soft play, they blur the personal and political. Pinocchio, Hamelin, Alice and The Tiger who Came to Tea make appearances alongside biblical tales: the ark, the whale’s belly, the Moses basket in the rushes. There are poems for lost daughters – Amy Winehouse, Madeleine McCann, the victims of honour killings – and lost sons. There are also poems about innocence and responsibility which ask what it means to bring new human beings into this world, and how we shape them through our words.
Ovid’s Heroines
Bloodaxe, 2013
Ovid’s Heroides, written in Rome some time between 25 and 16 BC, was once his most popular work. The title translates as Heroines. It is a series of poems in the voices of women from Greek and Roman myth – including Phaedra, Medea, Penelope and Ariadne – addressed to the men they love.
Claimed as both the first book of dramatic monologues and the first of epistolary fiction, Heroines is also a radical text in its literary transvestism, and in presenting the same story from often very different, subjective perspectives.
For a long time it was Ovid’s most influential work, loved by Chaucer, Dante, Marlowe, Shakespeare and Donne, and translated by Dryden and Pope. Clare Pollard’s new translation rediscovers Ovid’s Heroines for the 21st century, with a cast of women who are brave, bitchy, sexy, suicidal, horrifying, heartbreaking and surprisingly modern.
Two of the most popular poetry books of recent times have been Ted Hughes’s new version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and Carol Ann Duffy’s The World’s Wife, dramatic monologues by women from myth and history giving their side of the story. Clare Pollard’s new take on Ovid’s Heroines is another book in that vein, bringing classic tales to life for modern readers.
Changeling
Bloodaxe, 2011
Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Clare Pollard’s fourth collection is steeped in folktale and ballads, and looks at the stories we tell about ourselves. From the Pendle witch-trials in 17th-century Lancashire to the gangs of modern-day east London, Changeling takes on our myths and monsters.
These are poems of place that journey from Zennor to Whitby, Broadstairs to Brick Lane. Whether relocating the traditional ballad ‘The Twa Corbies’ to war-torn Iraq, introducing us to the bearded lady Miss Lupin, or giving us a glimpse of the ‘beast of Bolton’, Changeling is a collection about our relationship with the Other: fear and trust, force and freedom.
Look, Clare! Look!
Bloodaxe, 2005
Look, Clare! Look! is the story of a year. When Clare Pollard set off on a six-month world trip, she wanted to write a long poem which engaged with what she saw and felt during her travels. On her return, she discovered that her father was seriously ill, and his funeral was held on New Year’s Eve.
Clare Pollard’s third collection is a book about journeys and home. She looks closely at both global issues and the blossom in her yard. Beginning as a meditation on western guilt against the backdrop of SARS and the Iraq War, it ends by looking at our closest relationships, in poems that deal with a pregnancy scare and her engagement, as well as illness and loss.
The Weather (Sold Out)
Faber, 2004
While cocktail-swigging Gail concerns herself with shopping and her husband buries his head in the sand, their teenaged daughter, Ellie, predicts the end of the world. The weather is alarmingly erratic, and there’s an enraged poltergeist in the kitchen…
This play premiered at the Royal Court Theatre.
Bedtime
Bloodaxe, 2002
Clare Pollard wrote her first book The Heavy-Petting Zoo while still at school. Its sequel is Bedtime: a setting for intimacy and tenderness as well as cruelty and pretence, where reality and fantasy are blurred. These are cutting poems from the edge, confronting evil in all its manifestations, especially the bondage of sex and cruelty. They address highly contemporary issues, from confessionalism and reality TV to masculinity in crisis, racial politics and atheism.
The Heavy-Petting Zoo
Bloodaxe, 1998
Clare Pollard wrote most of these poems while still at school in Bolton. Too young, perhaps, to expect anyone to take her seriously, but young enough to question that assumption and much else besides. Her poems are fresh and energetic, barbed with a modern girl’s natural cynicism, but tempered with open-eyed hope as well as wry acceptance.
The book gives us the world according to Clare Pollard writing as a teenager, an insider’s in-your-face portrayal of the tarnished lives of today’s bright young things.
‘This is work you can’t ignore – raw, reckless and more bloody-minded than an older, so-called wiser poet would dare to be. Clare Pollard tells us what it’s like to be young, slim and pissed at the door of the 21st century’ – Selima Hill.
clarepollard 
Leave a Reply