Polly Clark was born in Toronto in 1968 and brought up in Lancashire, Cumbria and the Borders of Scotland. She has worked variously as a zookeeper, a teacher of English in Hungary and in publishing at Oxford University Press. In 1997 she won an Eric Gregory Award for her poetry. She has published three collections with Bloodaxe: her first collection, Kiss (2000), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; her second, Take Me With You (Bloodaxe Books, 2005), was a Poetry Book Society Choice shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize; her third was Farewell My Lovely (2009). Afterlife is due from Bloodaxe in 2020. Her novel, Larchfield, inspired by Auden's formative years in Helensburgh, Scotland, won the Mslexia Novel Competition in 2015, and was published by Quercus in their riverrun imprint in 2017. She has also published short stories, and her memoir, Thank You So Much For Writing, won the 2014 Tony Lothian Prize for a new, unpublished biography. Polly now lives on the West Coast of Scotland and is Literature Programme Producer for Cove Park, Scotland's International Artist Residency Centre.
Not many poets have worked, as Clark has, in a zoo. Animals, in
their violence and strength and beauty, play an important part in
her repertoire of reference and subtly inform her presentation of
human experience, from birth to death, from ecstasy to profound
grief. But this isn’t comfortable poetry. Clark wastes no words,
makes no concessions to timid readers: offers instead moments of
vision of tremendous intensity and charge. These are poems of an
alert imagination and a strongly original mind, poems that run
along the dangerous edge of things, risky and skilful as an
acrobat. What you get from Clark is the electrical impulse, rather
than the narrative voice – poems to stiffen the hairs on the back
of your neck. A breathtakingly assured first collection.
*U.A. Fanthorpe*
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.
*PBS Bulletin*
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