A01=Polly Clark
Author_Polly Clark
Category=DCF
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Product details
- ISBN 9781852245351
- Weight: 109g
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 27 Apr 2000
- Publisher: Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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Polly Clark shows the complex and often brutal making of a self in the poems of her first collection, from first passions, through losses and disappointments, to attempts to understand and forgive origins. The forces which shape who we are take on many personalities: surgeons, horses, Amazon parrots, Pontius Pilate and huge beetles all have lessons to teach about loss, bereavement and the shaping of a fragile identity. Who decides who we are and what we will be? Her journey encompasses diverse locations, from her native Canada to Hungary and Edinburgh Zoo, from the hospital bed to the zoo enclosure, demonstrating that places can be as important as people in shaping our internal landscape. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.
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 2020. Her novel, Larchfield, inspired by Auden's formative years in Helensburgh, Scotland, won the Mslexia Novel Competition in 2015, and was published by Quercus in their riverrun imprint in 2017. 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also published short stories, and her memoir, Thank You So Much For Writing, won the 2014 Tony Lothian Prize for a new, unpublished biography.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 now lives on the West Coast of Scotland and is Literature Programme Producer for Cove Park, Scotland's International Artist Residency Centre.
