Lives of the Female Poets

Clare Pollard

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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.

Book Details

Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
Publish Date: Nov 18th, 2025
Pages: 80
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.40in - 0.35lb
EAN: 9781780377476
Categories: • European - English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh• Women Authors• Subjects & Themes - Family

About the Author

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.

Praise for this book

'Taking its name - and project - from Samuel Johnson's 1781 all-male Lives of the Poets, Pollard's Lives of the Female Poets pays tribute to the likes of Elizabeth Bishop, Forough Farrokhzād, Praxilla, Emily Brontë and Wanda Coleman, juxtaposing poetic history with scenes from her own contemporary life as a female poet.[...] In establishing a tradition of women and women's (written) work, Pollard elevates women's work and lives (embodied, messy, meaty, boozy) to being worthy of poetry.' - Ellora Sutton, Mslexia

'Pollard's latest collection spans the breadth of human creativity and creation. It's at once a joyous tribute to some of history's greatest female poets and to the smaller things that make a life - like cocktails, and head lice. These poems are physical and playful, bold yet delicate as we're swept along by references and allusions that dance off the page. It's poetry at its most confident. In the crescendoing titular poem Pollard's "saintly Poetess" deservedly finds her place in the canon she's honouring.' - Nasim Rebecca Asl, Poetry Book Society Autumn Bulletin 2025

'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

'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