Posts By: Clare Pollard

‘Viciousness in the Kitchen!’ – reading Plath’s Ariel(s)

When I think of most poets, I think of individual poems. Say Auden and I think: ‘As I Walked out one Evening’, for Larkin ‘Aubade’, for Bishop ‘One Art’. I honestly couldn’t name which individual collections any of these poems were in. Say Sylvia Plath though and I, like most people, would immediately think: Ariel. It’s…

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The Poetry of Parenthood

The images coming from Gaza at the moment show mutilated and dying children.  It would be tempting to say that as a parent you feel the horror more, but this is smug nonsense: people without children are just as capable of compassion.  What a parent feels is, instead, perhaps more complicated – my compassion is…

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