Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize
Poetry Book Society Choice
The landscape of Polly Clark’s Take Me with You is strange and dangerous, her narrators searching for answers to questions about the nature of human attachment and longing. Her acclaimed first book Kiss took the reader on a journey into the self: in this new collection, the journey turns outwards and explores the ways in which we connect with others and the wider world.
Polly Clark’s characters speak in many voices, both animal and human, bringing into focus the moments when we are most alive, and most alone. The poems are unsettling even as they are compelling, taking the reader from the last performance of a virtuoso octopus, to the dizzying industry of a Chinese city, to the vast and lonely seascapes of the Scottish coast.
‘Grippingly acute and assured’ – Gerard Woodward, Times Literary Supplement
‘Clark chooses a vivid palette…Tiny bearcubs curl up in her psyche. A cockatoo clambers about her as if she were a gnarled tropical tree. There is an elemental freshness to these poems’ – Rachel Campbell-Johnson, The Times
‘An unusual and compelling turn of phrase in poems which shape-shift through multiple personalities’ – Jane Holland, Poetry Review
‘Alive and vital, her voice rings with inspired confidence, carries the stamp of what is necessary, poems that cannot be done without’ – Sarah Corbett, Poetry Wales
