Polly Clark's haunting third collection is about leaving one's life and returning a stranger. In poems which are moving and often darkly comic, she explores the ways in which we try to hang on to what we were, and the ways in which we accept that everything we were certain of has gone forever. "Farewell My Lovely" is a book of transformation in many voices, from riffs on popular songs to a modern reworking of "Magnificat" or "Mary's Song". Polly Clark's vivid and unswerving gaze is applied with the same intensity to a dream of childhood, the vulnerability of a new species of bird or the fragility of marriage, creating a powerful collection about the price of survival. The book ends with a final farewell to innocence in a series of poems drawn from the Falklands War.

About the Author
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 2022. Her pamphlet A Handbook for the Afterlife was shortlisted in the 2016 Michael Marks Awards. She lives in Helensburgh on Scotland's west coast, close to where W.H. Auden wrote The Orators. She writes on a houseboat in London. Larchfield, her debut novel, inspired by Auden's life and work in Helensburgh, was published to critical acclaim by Quercus under their riverrun imprint in 2017. Tiger, her second novel, was published by Quercus in 2019. 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also published short stories, and her memoir, Thank You So Much For Writing, won the 2014 Tony Lothian Prize for a new, unpublished biography.

Reviews
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 *
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 * Guardian *
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 * Guardian *



Book Information
ISBN 9781852248253
Author Polly Clark
Format Paperback
Page Count 64
Imprint Bloodaxe Books Ltd
Publisher Bloodaxe Books Ltd