Farewell My Lovely - Softcover

Clark, Polly

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1852248254 ISBN 13: 9781852248253

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books, 2009

Synopsis

Polly Clark’s haunting 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 this title

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published short stories, and her memoir, Thank You So Much For Writing, won the 2014 Tony Lothian Prize for a new, unpublished biography.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1852248254
• ISBN 13: 9781852248253
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 64