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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
TAKE ME WITH YOU takes the subjective element and opens it into the world, in the form of strange emblematic creatures, people and places, and enters language at the most intimate and poignant of angles. --George Szirtes, Poetry London
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
TAKE ME WITH YOU takes the subjective element and opens it into the world, in the form of strange emblematic creatures, people and places, and enters language at the most intimate and poignant of angles. --George Szirtes, Poetry London
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
Product Description
Polly Clark's haunting new 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.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The cover image of Polly Clark's superb third collection, `Farewell my Lovely', shows the figure of a woman who appears to be emerging from, but at the same time disappearing into, the background: like the narrator of many of Clark's poems, she is captured at the point where she could either surrender to the world, or cut herself free from it. It is a peopled world, full of babies, husbands, mothers, midwives, doctors, men suddenly encountered laughing in cracks in the road, or wheeling past on Chair-o-planes, but again and again, Clark pulls the focus back from her characters, to show us the wider context, the forces which give them their lives, and which could just as easily take them away. The rocks, winds and sea waves of the West of Scotland are characters in themselves, loved but also feared. The last few poems in the book, in the sequence `I Thought It Was in Scotland', are set in her most terrifying and arbitrary landscape, that of the Falklands during the war, in which a boy soldier suffers terrible injuries, and loses his innocence. This mark a shift in tone from the more lyrical voice in the rest of the collection, as the young paratrooper's voice takes over, but, like the other poems, they are tautly written, with a savage black humour that can trip you up when you least expect it.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Though on the surface Farewell My Lovely may appear lighter and more direct than Polly Clark's previous collections Kiss (2000) and Take Me With You (2005), this is but an effect of the poet's ever-increasing mastery of her craft. As the poems sink in and the images infuse, the reader realises how deft and powerful Polly Clark's use of ambivalence is, for there is humour in this collection but of a kind that leaves great room for poignant depth in lines such as "I got married and everything was different. / It seemed impolite to leave, so I didn't" ("Marriage"). "Friends", based on the speaker's appreciation for the TV series, is another example of the poet's accessible ways of reaching intricacy. Farewell My Lovely's multiple layers make putting it back on the shelf almost inconceivable. It grows on you as you come to appreciate Polly Clark's precise diction and the absence of any form of soppiness when dealing with themes such as motherhood, death or war, and you grow through it, through its journeys filled with the poet's usual menagerie and oceanic landscapes. This collection is the perfect gift to lure the layman into the realm of poetry and bring the connoisseur closer to its core.
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