Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

It’s a pity that Bloodaxe tells us that Clare Pollard is 19 and wrote most of these poems while at school, because one instinctively makes allowances - Isn’t she clever? How skilful for one so young - when, in Pollard’s case, there is absolutely no need.

Apart from the title poem, there is nothing to suggest that the poems are written by a gifted teenager. They have the range, assurance and experimental élan that a poet of any age would be proud of and their themes are timeless: the need for love, the difficulty of achieving it, insecurities, angers. Only the context of some of the poems, and a lack of the regret that is one of age’s afflictions, mark the writer as younger rather than older.

Only the title poem indicates the poet’s age:

It’s your best friend’s 16th birthday party.
That’s eight hamster lives, and yet she still wasn’t
                                                                  wise enough
to realise it would turn into a heavy-petting zoo.
Let’s put it this way - you wouldn’t bring the family
and there’s an awful lot of stroking going on.

The scene is adolescent but the tone is adult - poised, knowing and demotic. Pollard is good on the realities of young people’s social life:

The girls’ loos are full
of lads smoking joints, so I have to piss quietly,

hovering over the bowl
as though I’m a hummingbird...
                  (A Friday Night at the End of the Millennium)

but this is not particularly original. The poems’ first strength lies in their striking images, all placed perfectly in their context: the wistful sigh of the Christmas tree angel:

O to have a Bethlehem to go to.
To be deep filled, like a mince pie.
                                                      (Angel Song)

the nausea of a hangover:

I’m strawberry-jam sickly; I’m bacon dead.
It’s always morning when the ghosts appear -
they haunt my toaster and they burn my bread
                                                               (Breakfast Poem)

a butterfly collector:

Recently he has been murdering the rainbow -
he has a Red Admiral
an Orange Tip
a Green Hairstreak.
                                                           (Butterfly Collector)

The book’s second strength is Pollard’s willingness to experiment. There are the formal experiments: Zaghruda which uses words in at least seven languages; Keyf which closely imagines life in the Istanbul harem; A Friday Night at the End of the Millennium in one hundred 4-line stanzas; and The Last Love Poem which integrates a wide range of styles and quotations (and mockingly includes “shantih stantih shantih” near the end). Less ambitious and perhaps more satisfying are the lower-key experiments: Attempt at a Beautiful Poem (it isn’t) and Hara-kiri which treats abortion wholly in terms of Japanese artefacts:

They will hook it out limb by limb.
Tough veined trout pink flesh
as raw as sushi.

A few poems have clumsy or exaggerated effects, but overall this is an immensely promising debut. She has two of Eliot’s three preconditions for greatness: abundance and variety - abundance because this book is a small fraction of her output; she had three poems in Magma 9, chosen from a larger number all equally good, of which only one (Angel Song) appears here.