Incarnation
Published on 23. February 2017
72 pages
978-1-78037-338-6 (ISBN)
Description
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.
Reviews / Votes
'In Clare Pollard's fifth poetry collection Incarnation, she writes of pregnancy and mothers and children, of fairytales and news headlines and horrors. The follow up to her 2013 reimagining of Ovid's Heroines with its emphasis on the possibilities (and necessities) of revising old stories, Pollard's poems remain sharp and compelling.' - Rosalind Jana, Stylist Magazine'Motherhood is one of the themes in Clare Pollard's new collection; but the book also broadens out into forceful and compassionate poems about the sorrows of the world into which our children are born... Incarnation is a book which, from the very first poem, can startle the reader with its vivid and muscular language and bold imagery.' - Michael Bartholomew-Biggs, London Grip
'There are some stunningly powerful pieces in this collection on the theme of children and our relationships with them. Poems about pregnancy and childbirth are viscerally real... This - male - reviewer was captivated and moved throughout by the power of these poems. An outstandingly effective collection.' - Frank Startup, The School Librarian
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tarset
United Kingdom
File size
0,90 MB
ISBN-13
978-1-78037-338-6 (9781780373386)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
Person
Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She has published five collections with Bloodaxe: The Heavy-Petting Zoo (1998), which she wrote while still at school; Bedtime (2002); Look, Clare! Look! (2005); Changeling (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; and Incarnation (2017). Her translation Ovid's Heroines was published by Bloodaxe in 2013. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premiered at the Royal Court Theatre. She works as an editor, broadcaster and teacher. Her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. She is co-editor, with James Byrne, of the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), and translator (with Maxamed Xasan 'Alto' and Said Jama Hussein) of Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf's The Sea-Migrations (Somali title: Tahriib), published by Bloodaxe Books in 2017 with The Poetry Translation Centre. In 2017 she took over the editorship of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her non-fiction book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind our Picture Books was published by Fig Tree in 2019.
Content
- Intro
- Description
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Contents
- Epigraph
- Jordan, September 2012
- The Reef
- Suffer
- The Last Poem of Rabia Balkhi, Written in Blood on Her Bathroom Walls After Her Veins Were Cut by Her Brother
- Kingdom
- Knowledge
- Message Beamed From Earth to Europa: 03.01 EST
- Circuit
- Afterbirth
- The Very Hungry Animal
- Solipsist Pantoum
- Beholden
- Digitalis
- Ghazal of the Rose
- Parables
- The Human Child
- Emmanuel
- Object Permanence
- At Peckham Rye
- Lullaby over a Moses Basket
- Singapore
- In the City of Shiva
- The Day Amy Died
- The Contradiction
- The Fair Is Coming
- Soft Play
- Hamelin
- 23 Mindblowing Truths You Didn't Know About the Princess
- The Pool of Tears
- Pinocchios
- Los Indignados
- On Pie Corner
- Sapiens
- Leviathan
- Lines after Rabi'ah al-Ba?ri
- Monte Alban
- Boys
- In the Horniman Museum
- About the Author
- Copyright
