Editorial Note by Max Wallis
In Pollard’s second poem in Issue One, Spoils, she returns to one of her most quietly devastating territories: the sweetness we’re taught to accept but can’t quite swallow. The poem begins in honey, golden, excessive, a substance that feels both earned and unearned at once, and moves quickly into the wider question of what we inherit, materially and emotionally, without ever having asked for it.
Here, sweetness is labour: the hive, the blooms, the careful work of other lives. And yet it is also something the speaker can hardly bear. Pollard threads that ambivalence through the maternal moment at the poem’s centre, where a child in late-afternoon light extinguishes her candles with the kind of effortless grace adults forget how to believe in. It’s a scene suffused with tenderness, but shadowed by the knowledge that joy doesn’t always arrive in a form we know how to keep.
By the time we reach the shelves lined with “little jars,” the poem has become an inquiry into the very act of making—poems as stores of sweetness, poems as perishables, poems as offerings whose future readers aren’t guaranteed. Pollard writes into that anxiety with unusual frankness: that preservation is not the same as permanence, and even our most careful hoardings have a date by which they must be opened or lost.
Spoils sits exactly where Issue One wanted to begin… at the point where beauty and unease hold one another upright, where joy threatens to turn, and where the poem becomes a vessel for what we are afraid to taste in real time.
I’ve been thinking a lot today about what writing poetry is. Based on this Bluesky by Rishi Dastiday (also in Issue One):
It made me think and respond:
What is it to write poetry?
It is soft hope, breath made paper, part unpeeling, part armour, part wish, part prayer.
A mosaic that appears only when the pieces of us settle.
Sometimes the poem asks; sometimes the reader answers; often the answer is simply the act of making.
I think Clare’s poem does likewise.
Max Wallis
PS These orders went to singapore, arran, southampton and more today!
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