Editorial Note by Max Wallis

What does it mean to be resilient when what you crave most is permission to stop pretending? In The Craving, Clare Pollard writes from the quiet exhaustion of motherhood: the need to hold everything together, the refusal to be seen breaking. Her humour is wry and deliberate: rejection emails, locked bathrooms, the polished insistence of I’m fine.

Then the poem tilts from the domestic to the mythical. Toward “an enchanted castle” and its golden fruit, shimmering with the forbidden relief of letting go. That fruit becomes the impossible bargain between care and collapse, self-preservation and surrender. It’s here that Pollard lays bare the hunger beneath endurance and the tenderness caught in the very act of suppression.

The poem’s closing defiance of No, you can’t make me rings with both fury and fatigue: a mother’s protest against the expectation to be endlessly strong, and the faint mercy of still standing, because, as Pollard says earlier: I’m really absolutely fine.

Clare Pollard’s most recent books are the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies. She has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, with her sixth, Lives of the Female Poets, forthcoming in 2025. Her poem ‘Pollen’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.

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