Incarnation

The poems in Clare Pollard’s 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.

‘Since her late teens, Clare Pollard has kept her poetic finger on the pulse of the world, writing poems of fierce love about the full scope of contemporary life from the intimacy of motherhood and the divided streets of London to elegies for the victims of honour killings and the climate crisis. Wonderfully skilled and with a rare lyrical gift, her poems ask today the questions the rest of us will ask tomorrow.’ – Owen Sheers on Clare Pollard, one of the ten writers 'asking questions to shape our future' he selected for the National Centre for Writing's International Literature Showcase in 2020.

‘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

‘... out this month is the poet Clare Pollard’s Incarnation, a meditation on pregnancy, children and storytelling... Pollard digs fearlessly into maternal anxieties, and the physical wonder of reproduction.’ – Charlotte Runcie, The Daily Telegraph

‘Pollard’s is a gritty reality, but one grounded with a culturally aware, geographically various, and historically wide-ranging sensibility: there are versions of creation myths, fairy tales, mystic poems, and laments for lost contemporaries… clear-eyed, intelligent questioning of what the world today offers our children, our future(s).’ – Heidi Williamson, The Poetry School

‘Her work really is emphatically of our time, capturing the world in its beauties and horrors in writing that’s technically superb, but which also has what, if I was a sentimental chap, I’d call heart.’ – Ian McMillan, The Verb

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 pamphlet The Lives of the Female Poets was published by Bad Betty Press in 2019. A full-length collection – her sixth – Lives of the Female Poets, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2025.

Her translation Ovid's Heroines was published by Bloodaxe in 2013. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premièred 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. Her non-fiction book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind our Picture Books was published by Fig Tree in 2019. Her novels for adults, Delphi (2022) and The Modern Fairies (2024), have been published by Fig Tree in the UK and Avid Reader in the US. Her book for children,The Untameables, illustrated by Reena Makwana, was published by The Emma Press in 2024. The Othernauts, a new telling of the myth of Jason and the Argonauts for younger readers illustrated by Macha Yao, is due from Piccadilly Press in 2026. She won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize in 2025 for The Modern Fairies, an award given to works that combine storytelling fiction and non-fiction in original ways, encompassing a range of artistic genres, disciplines, cultures and subjects.

Clare Pollard was Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation from 2017 to 2022 and was appointed Artistic Director of the Winchester Poetry Festival in 2022. Her poem 'Pollen' – first published in Bad Lilies and now included in Lives of the Female Poets – was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem 2022. In 2024 she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.