Incarnation

The poems in Clare Pollard's fifth 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.

Table of Contents:
11 Jordan, September 2012 12 The Reef 14 Suffer 19 The Last Poem of Rabia Balkhi, Written in Blood on Her Bathroom Walls After Her Veins Were Cut by Her Brother 20 Kingdom 21 Knowledge 22 Message Beamed From Earth to Europa: 03:01 EST 23 Circuit 24 Afterbirth 26 The Very Hungry Animal 27 Solipsist Pantoum 28 Beholden 29 Digitalis 30 Ghazal of the Rose 31 Parables 33 The Human Child 34 Emmanuel 36 Object Permanence 37 At Peckham Rye 38 Lullaby over a Moses Basket 39 The Fair is Coming 40 Singapore 41 In the City of Shiva 43 The Day Amy Died 45 The Contradiction 46 Soft Play 48 Hamelin 49 23 Mindblowing Truths You Didn't Know About the Princess 51 The Pool of Tears 54 Pinocchios 55 Los Indignados 56 On Pie Corner 57 Sapiens 58 Leviathan 60 Lines after Rabi'ah al-Basri 63 Monte Alban 64 Boys 66 In the Horniman Museum

About the Author :
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.

Review :
‘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