Farewell My Lovely

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also published short stories, and her memoir, Thank You So Much For Writing, won the 2014 Tony Lothian Prize for a new, unpublished biography.

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.