Lives of the Female Poets - Paperback

by Clare Pollard (Author)

Clare Pollard thumbs her nose at Dr Johnson's all-male Lives of the Poets in chronicling her own life and theirs in her Lives of the Female Poets.

These portraits and self portraits offer glimpses into the poet's own everyday life - from nit-combing and laundry to pollen counts and cocktails, watching school plays to shopping on Rye Lane - all whilst in conversation with female poets through the ages. Playing with forms from the version to the glosa, these are poems that remix, adapt and channel figures from Enheduanna, the first recorded poet, through to Wanda Coleman. Probing the idea of the 'Poetess' over time, there are also poems about writers' lives - sonnets for Anne Locke, who wrote the first English sonnet sequence; a sestina for Elizabeth Bishop; a series of prose poems about Emily Brontë; and a look at the tragic life of L.E.L.

Whether imagining a 'three-martini afternoon' at the Ritz with Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, or exploring the ways women writers have been erased from the canon in the book's long, closing poem, Clare Pollard's playful sixth collection celebrates and commemorates all those female poets who have come before.

Author Biography

Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She is a poet, editor and translator and 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, Incarnation (2017) and Lives of the Female Poets (2025). She has also written an illustrated book for children, non-fiction and two novels for adults. Her debut novel Delphi (Fig Tree, 2022; Avid Reader, US, 2022) has been translated into German, Dutch and Spanish. She won the Tadeusz Bradecki Prize in 2025 for her novel The Modern Fairies (2024), 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.