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Lives of the Female Poets
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- About the Author
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Poetess
- Inana after Enheduanna
- On Emily Brontë, Aged Six
- Pollen
- The Head-louse
- Praxilla
- In Nunhead Cemetery (for Charlotte Mew) 23
- The White Lady
- Rye Lane
- Sestina for Elizabeth Bishop
- Pothos
- Housecat
- Cocktail List
- Spoils
- Two Sonnets for Anne Locke
- The Sex Life of Emily Brontë
- The Craving
- The Pub Crawl
- Three-Martini Afternoon
- Improvisatrice
- Emily Brontë and the Critic
- Pornhub
- Why I Won’t Listen to Sad Pop Songs Any More 58
- Last Word a glosa for Wanda Coleman 60
- Poetry after Marianne Moore
- The Lives of the Female Poets
- Acknowledgements