Incarnation

Clare Pollard

• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781780373386
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The poems in Clare Pollard's new collection 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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Epigraph
• Jordan, September 2012
• The Reef
• Suffer
• The Last Poem of Rabia Balkhi, Written in Blood on Her Bathroom Walls After Her Veins Were Cut by Her Brother
• Kingdom
• Knowledge
• Message Beamed From Earth to Europa: 03.01 EST
• Circuit
• Afterbirth
• The Very Hungry Animal
• Solipsist Pantoum
• Beholden
• Digitalis
• Ghazal of the Rose
• Parables
• The Human Child
• Emmanuel
• Object Permanence
• At Peckham Rye
• Lullaby over a Moses Basket
• Singapore
• In the City of Shiva
• The Day Amy Died
• The Contradiction
• The Fair Is Coming
• Soft Play
• Hamelin
• 23 Mindblowing Truths You Didn’t Know About the Princess
• The Pool of Tears
• Pinocchios
• Los Indignados
• On Pie Corner
• Sapiens
• Leviathan
• Lines after Rābi‘ah al-Baṣrī
• Monte Alban
• Boys
• In the Horniman Museum
• About the Author
• Copyright