Polly Clark’s haunting collection is about leaving one’s life and returning a stranger. In poems which are moving and often darkly comic, she explores the ways in which we try to hang on to what we were, and the ways in which we accept that everything we were certain of has gone forever. Farewell My Lovely is a book of transformation in many voices, from riffs on popular songs to a modern reworking of Magnificat or Mary’s Song. Polly Clark’s vivid and unswerving gaze is applied with the same intensity to a dream of childhood, the vulnerability of a new species of bird or the fragility of marriage, creating a powerful collection about the price of survival. The book ends with a final farewell to innocence in a series of poems drawn from the Falklands War.