Bedtime

Clare Pollard was born in Bolton in 1978 and lives in London. She 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; and Incarnation (2017). Her translation Ovid's Heroines was published by Bloodaxe in 2013. Her first play The Weather (Faber, 2004) premièred at the Royal Court Theatre. She works as an editor, broadcaster and teacher. Her documentary for radio, My Male Muse (2007), was a Radio 4 Pick of the Year. She is co-editor, with James Byrne, of the anthology Voice Recognition: 21 poets for the 21st century (Bloodaxe Books, 2009), and translator (with Maxamed Xasan ‘Alto’ and Said Jama Hussein) of Asha Lul Mohamud Yusuf's The Sea-Migrations (Somali title: Tahriib), published by Bloodaxe Books in 2017 with The Poetry Translation Centre. In 2017 she took over the editorship of Modern Poetry in Translation. Her non-fiction book Fierce Bad Rabbits: The Tales Behind our Picture Books was published by Fig Tree in 2019.

Clare Pollard has so much youthful talent that it’s alarming. The poems in Bedtime have all the virtues of youth. They are raw and sexy, exotic and compelling, their insights at once intimate and universal. There’s a cruel precision of observation too, coupled with a real opulence, about these pieces – and the wonderful, reckless revelling in the language. I loved the headlong rush of it all.