Some Reviews of Clare’s Work:
Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind Children’s Picture Books
When I read Fierce Bad Rabbits, I thought, why has no one written this book before? But Clare Pollard has done so superbly – it is perceptive, illuminating, scholarly but at the same time entertaining. It should be essential reading for every thinking parent -Penelope Lively
Delightful. As good a guide as you could hope for. It will make you think again about why you loved the children’s stories that mean so much to you, and it will lead you to new discoveries too. . . A happy reconnection to the serious joys of childhood – Erica Wagner, Harper’s Bazaar
Delight is the secret ingredient in poet and playwright Clare Pollard’s captivating first book – The Observer
Within 10 minutes of opening Fierce Bad Rabbits, I was mentally composing a list of friends who would be getting it for Christmas. And that list is a long one; while an obvious choice for those with small children, this book is also a kind of time machine, sending the reader pelting back to when memories are huge yet unformed, when we discover not just the world around us, but the world within. […] Pollard is a poet, and her prose is stunning, as pellucid as that of the picture books she adores. She compares the seemingly impossible challenges of early motherhood with going to sea in a sieve, writes with a joy that is luminous of, “those sudden seconds – your child lifts a flap and hisses like a snake for the first time” […] Essential reading for anyone with a child, or who ever was a child, in Fierce Bad Rabbits, Pollard finally gives picture books the gravitas they deserve – Marianne Levy, I News
An enlightening, perceptive analysis of the books that build us – Lucy Scholes, Sunday Telegraph, 5 star review
‘Opening a picture book from your childhood can be dangerous,’ Clare Pollard warns of her history of illustrated children’s books. Each chapter examines how a weighty topic – anthropomorphism, didacticism, femininity – is packaged for children. Pollard so delicately enters into the world of ‘sweet treats, acrobats and laughter’, that the reader feels they are rediscovering once-loved landscapes. Her accounts of works by the likes of Beatrix Potter dissect the way our childhoods were crafted while rendering them, as Lewis Carroll’s Alice said, ‘curiouser and curiouser’ – The New Statesman
A gem . . . hard to put down. The combination of vast scholarly research and witty writing makes for a thoroughly enjoyable book. Pollard has managed to dissect all our favourite stories with her scalpel, while leaving their magic intact – Spectator
Most people’s primal cultural memory is that of being read to by a parent. This is a phenomenon most sensitively and intelligently explored in Fierce Bad Rabbits – Daily Telegraph
This book is a happy way to reconnect with old friends – Times
Pollard balances the personal (her childhood memories – her introduction to feminism through Best Friends for Frances – or her experiences reading with her own children – a beautifully evocative reminder of why Dogger makes us cry) with the analytical, the detailed with the big-picture […] One of my own favourite sequences sees Pollard linking Christmas, Ezra Jack Keats, The Snowman, silence, snow, and – briefly, poignantly – the death of her own father. It’s a reading of the visual as well as the words and silences; it’s a reading that has wonder, beauty, emotion, depth. As befitting its subject. – Daniel Hahn, Books for Keeps
Incarnation
Clare Pollard’s new book has a good deal of anger in it. An anger especially powerful because the book reflects on what it is like to carry, birth and raise a child in a world as fractured and problematic as ours […] Pollard’s book is visceral, subverting a socially accepted euphemistic or beatific mode. -Kayo Chingonyi, Poetry London
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 – from Amy Winehouse to honour killings. Ultimately, Pollard is an idealist: love (and art) is possible and perhaps redeeming […] In ‘The Second Life of Art’, Eugenio Montale says: ‘The ultimate possibility of social significance which an art born of life always has [is] to return to life, to serve man, to say something for him.’ In this collection, Pollard admirably fulfils this, offering us clear-eyed, intelligent questioning of what the world today offers our children, our future(s). – Heidi Williamson, The Poetry School
Ovid’s Heroines
Pollard, a wunderkind who wrote her first poetry collection while still at school, is a good match for the equally precocious Ovid…these are lively versions, seasoned with both agony and irony, reanimating Ovid’s originals. -Josephine Balmer, The Times
Ovid died in exile, booted out of Rome for what he described as carmen et error – a poem and a mistake. These letters remind us that he, of all Latin love poets, understood the plight of the person left behind, waiting for news. He knew that even bad news was less excruciating than no news. And this breezy, witty translation should give new readers the chance to share this understanding. – Natalie Haynes, The Guardian
Pollard’s Translation is one of the best books of poetry I’ve read this year. Its vivacity, empathy and variety show how much today’s poets can still learn from a Latin-speaking writer of two millennia ago – Frank Beck, The Manhattan Review
Changeling
This fourth collection from the Bolton-born, East London-living, wildly talented young poet is a total beauty. Changeling witnesses Clare Pollard brilliantly re-rub some old English folktales and transcribe them to our own troubled times, as well as offering up some 40 of her own bewitching compositions. These leap ably between ancient lore and recent political outrage…this is proper knockout, stop-you-in-your-tracks stuff – Dazed and Confused
With Changeling, Clare Pollard fulfils the promise of her remarkable earliest collection, written whilst she was still at school. This is clearly poetry for the 21st – edgy and alive, youthful and intelligent…a particular strength of this collection is Pollard’s contemporary take on form, the ballad, the sonnet, the shape poem, the list, all are invigorated…This energising poet can help us confront the unease and complexity of modern life. – PBS Bulletin
The poems are startling, formally inventive, the diction never less than astonishingly varied – it is a passionate, angry, moving, alarming, splendid book. Reading it inspired me to think of new things poetry could say and do; in this collection Pollard moves into the front rank of British poets – Todd Swift, Eyewear (British Poetry Book of 2011)
‘Tam Lin’s Wife’ is perhaps her greatest triumph yet, illustrating the painful yet courageous concessions that love can require. Though based upon a fantastical Scottish ballad, its resonances are broad and far-reaching…Even when a poem’s message is partially obscured, the impression it leaves is always vivid and concentrated. Clare’s elegance of expression ensures that such poems are still a pleasure – as well as a discomfort – to read. – Rina Buznea, Time Out
Pollard is still at her best with the lyrical and personal, and it is “Waiting for the Kettle to Boil, Lancashire” that fully combines the themes that have always driven Pollard’s work – identity, ambition, duty, guilt – with the colloquial tone and eye for life’s paradoxes that lend her best poems charm and force. – Ben Wilkinson, Guardian
Pollard’s poetry is precise, technical and thrilled with energy and honesty… The language and the subjects leave a persistence of vision, a lingering need to read the poems again and let the urgent, controlled-but-ragged voice inside you once more, wondering what will happen when you do. – S.J.Holloway, Orbis
Look, Clare! Look!
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.
The themes are ancient – guilt, grief, the almost unbearable com-mingling of beauty and suffering – but shown through contemporary globalised life in all its grossness and glory…Pollard’s wit, honesty and recklessness – Frances Leviston, Yorkshire Post.
The Weather (The Royal Court, 2004)
As a published poet, Pollard has a good ear for language and, as an aspiring dramatist, she wittily exploits the possibilities of theatre. Not since Blithe Spirit have we seen a play in which domestic objects acquire such dynamic life. – Michael Billington, The Guardian.
Pollard’s writing has such energy and humour… Gail in particular… is a great comic creation. – Robert Shore Time Out (Critic’s Choice)
The dialogue has a sharp wit and bruises as much as it cuts; Gail’s pretensions, Bob’s resignation and Ellie’s rebelliousness looks like the familiar stuff of domestic comedy, but they mask breathtaking emotional violence. Pollard weaves these themes into her psychodrama with fresh passion and an assured panache remarkable in a first play…And the puzzle of what’s really behind these supernatural goings-on is part of the play’s fascination; to find out, I strongly recommend that you see it – Sam Marlow, The Times.
There’s undeniable power in Pollard’s writing, and the play’s cutting humour is clearly energised by a young person’s frustration and anger at the prospect of a future wantonly curtailed and at the complacency of the older generation which ascribes all the blame to “them”. “The older you get, the more you realise it’s them. Them,” Ellie’s father pontificates. There are also some shrewd and poetic reflections on the difficulty of believing in the end of the world. – Paul Taylor. The Independent.
Bedtime
Clare Pollard has so much youthful talent that it’s alarming. The poems in Bedtime…have all the virtues of youth. They are raw and sexy, exotic and compelling, their insights at once intimate and universal. There’s a cruel precision of observation too, coupled with a real opulence, about these pieces – and the wonderful, reckless revelling in the language. I loved the headlong rush of it all. – Catherine Czerkawska, Mslexia
Pollard’s voice is modern, erudite and original; her subjects are wide-ranging, her use of language dazzling and she is prepared to experiment formally…Her account of a smear test has appalled and delighted women I have shown it to and the last poem in the book is laugh-out-loud funny. – Arthur Smith, The Guardian
What distinguishes Pollard is not so much her age (she was born in 1978 and wrote her first book, The Heavy-Petting Zoo, while still at school), but her zest for words and the patterns they make. Her writing is energised…engaged and engaging. Here one senses the artist’s excitement at the very act of creation, in hammering words together: arteries thicken “like moss-plush gutters”; arum lilies “seem the sun-bleached skulls of cattle”. She shows considerable daring in tackling unpredictable subjects — for instance, in a love poem from Eva Braun to Hitler — that others might avoid. Hers is an authentic voice of the 18-30 generation. – The New Statesman
Two days came and went mooching around the impressively well-stocked poetry section at Foyles bookshop. But to my dismay the amount of anonymous dross on offer was remarkable. I nearly gave up until at last something spoke to me. A poem of hypochondria and love, nihilism and wonder that ended with the lines:
“My mortal love, what fucking fools we are.”
It was the bravest thing I had read in two days. Pollard, only 25, bothered to engage with the modern world in her writing. And she stood out, the voice was lively and had a passion so conspicuous by its absence in my two-day trawl. – Patrick Hussey, The Independent
The Heavy Petting Zoo
This is such a striking book that at any age it would be remarkable – from a teenage writer it leaves you excited that there may be so much more to come. – Time Out.
No one outside the poetry world has heard of Clare Pollard. That will change. Pollard is just 22 and already a seasoned observer and a master technician… She approaches life with a sort of appalled and embittered tenderness. It’s like Sylvia Plath reinterpreted for the Trainspotting generation. Expect her star to rise fast. – Lloyd Evans, The Daily Mail (Books of the year, 2001)
One of the brashest and most exciting young talents in poetry today…An original talent gathering speed…A poet who has looked at the past and unapologetically stamped her own face on it…She possesses the most vital qualification for a poet, an unerringly accurate ear…Her real talent lies in the subtle and organic rhythms of her free verse. – Jane Holland, Poetry Review.
Clare Pollard’s poetry is contemporary in themes and tone, by turns cynical and passionate…[she has] a Larkinesque ability to follow an image that disgusts with one of redeeming and illuminating beauty. The collection closes with a tour de force in ‘The Last Love Poem’, a cascade of emotion allusion and vivid imagery which leaves the reader breathless…I loved it. – School Librarian.
clarepollard 
Leave a Reply