On Creative Life and Afterlife
Niall Campbell talks to Polly Clark about poetry and fiction
Niall Campbell, Polly Clark
Niall Campbell: You’ve had an interesting journey as a writer. Your first collection of poetry was published by Bloodaxe in 2000 – and your first novel, Larchfield, was published in 2017. Was fiction always on your mind or did it rise to prominence for a period? Can you tell me a little about that initial journey between poetry and prose?
Polly Clark: I wrote poems all through my rural childhood spent in Cumbria and Scotland, though I did not know this is what they were. There were no examples at home that I was copying. No one said: ‘That’s a poem’. I just produced, prolifically, short intense pieces using the only material I had: my feelings and my life. It was only later when I found the poets I loved that I understood I was participating in the great flow of ‘poetry’ and what I was doing fell into place.
During my late teens and twenties I published poems anonymously while working at various jobs, and only really entered the poetry ‘scene’ when I stumbled across the Eric Gregory Awards, entered in the last year it was possible for me to do so, and won. I had moved to Oxford by then and formed connections with other writers and poets. I was passionately interested in all kinds of literature, and voraciously read novels and plays as well as poetry, but I did not have the same confidence to attempt them.
Alongside this was a growing restlessness about poetry as my sole way of being a writer. I wanted readers. In my slightly rarified poetry community wanting readers was seen as perhaps a little vulgar. But it genuinely made me grieve that Kiss, which had poems that I knew people loved, could never hope to reach a broad readership.
NC: Wanting readers is still a little bit loaded now, isn’t it. So, was it then that fiction took hold?
PC: Fiction remained an aspiration, but it was life that precipitated it into a possibility. I got married and followed my husband from Oxford where I was living and back to Scotland – this time on the west coast on a remote peninsula, near Britain’s nuclear weapons base at Faslane. We settled there and I had a much longed for baby.
I couldn’t drive, had no family or friends within hundreds of miles. When I woke to the eerie sight of minesweepers and submarines sailing past my window, it seemed I was living inside someone else’s subconscious. Combined with the shock of new motherhood, I was completely dislocated from myself. One of the poems from this period, ‘Marriage’, describes my being ‘reset’. Looking back, I wonder if I needed something this seismic to open me up to new ways of thinking.
Someone told me that WH Auden had lived in the neighbouring town, Helensburgh, and taught at the school, Larchfield, in 1930. I was stunned by this news, and by the lack of interest shown by both his English biographers and Scottish historians of the area. However, Auden was not a favourite poet of mine. I couldn’t see how to find the connection with him that is vital to writing. I didn’t want to write a biography, and I didn’t feel the right things to write poems. So, I am embarrassed to say, I sat with this utter gem for seven years, unable to approach it, unable to move on from it.
Eventually, I was so desperate to do something, that I decided just to try and write what I needed to write without labelling it. By then my daughter was attending the school at which Auden had taught (renamed Lomond and partly rebuilt after a fire). I began simply to write into what mattered to me.
NC: You say, to write what mattered to you – but how did you begin to explore this idea? For me, it was almost lucky that my son was born right as my first collection was published as this new world, as a parent, opened so immediately. ‘Wow, there is this new life and it’s all I care about’. It was trickier for my third book, as you can’t do the same thing, no-one want to do the same thing – but what else did I care about? What else mattered to me, as you say. Isn’t art just a constant reflection on this?
But I’m always curious as to how a larger narrative is formed. I’m so used to the contemporary poetic form – and my favourite has always been the lyric. But how did you tackle the longer part of writing a novel instead of a poem?
PC: My first task was simply to untangle myself from the notion that I was writing a narrative. I was interested in Auden’s loneliness, his secret self that could never be revealed except in his work, his outsider status. These qualities mirrored my own. Helensburgh is largely unchanged, as is the coastline; it was easy to imagine him in all the places I knew. On my desk I had a photo of him outside Larchfield with his pupils in 1930, and a photo of myself stood in the same spot, the backdrop the same. He was writing about places in Helensburgh I knew, and having a not dissimilar response.
I wrote snippets, scenes, anything that arose from the same intense feeling that sparks a poem for me. When I felt my level of interest in a scene dropping, I simply stopped and wrote a scene from somewhere else. As if they were poems I suppose, or the fragments I wrote as a child.
NC: That’s actually such a nice way of going about a larger project. Whenever I’ve tried my hand at fiction – and ok, I’m trying my hand at it even now over these beginning months of 2026 – I start and the start and hope/pray to end at the end. I feel I’m groping out the story and therefore need the guiderail of the throughline plot. I’ve heard of writers who start at the end, etc – but found it hard to really visualise going about this. But dipping in and around a story – feeling for the energy – that’s interesting.
PC: The gift a poet brings to the task of writing a novel is an intense interest in structure. And this is gold, for a novel is a made object. Richard Ford said something I have never forgotten: that people think the novel works on the chapter level, or maybe the paragraph. But it doesn’t. It works on the word level. Ford reads his novels to his wife to check the rhythm of the lines, just like a poet.
In the end I trained myself to feel okay with my haphazard method and not worry about the parts I was afraid of being unable to do: speech, plot, character. So I suppose what I am saying is I brought what I had to the task, and the rest of it bloomed from that.
For a long time I had two narratives that were unconnected: the story of a young poet married with a baby arriving in Helensburgh, and the pieced together story of Auden in the town. My unshakeable conviction was these two people must and would meet somehow and they would give solace to each other.
When at last the moment arrived for them to meet, my naivety about fiction writing along with my isolation from any influence saved me from doubting my central conceit. Someone would most certainly have talked me out of it. As it was, it became the defining moment of the novel and the distinctive twist that attracted the right editor to me, who saw in what I had done, a ‘born novelist’.
NC: It’s fascinating that isolation turned out to be what you needed to create. So different from what we are often taught or assume about creativity and ideas around creative community. I feel vulnerable to admit it, but I probably did need the community or certainly the few friends that I could obsess over the art with. I’m thinking of Douglas Dunn’s poem ‘The Friendship of Young Poets’, where he says:
My youth was as private as the bank at midnight, and in its safety no talking behind backs, no one alike enough to be pretentious with and quote lines at.
There was relief, for me, in finding those few people to be pretentious with. Who helped steer me right. And I did need some steering. My early poems were so bad. But what happened to your poems at this point?
PC: Yes, I missed my poetry friends very much. But I suppose that meant I was living very intensely: I was saturated in books and Auden’s poetry, and I was living in the setting for my novel. And I was feeling the feelings of my characters. The book became an exploration of my deep personal questions about human connection. Its central thesis was, I suppose, that friendship knows no boundary: time, even being real, these don’t matter if the longing is strong enough.
That longing is a recurring theme in my poetry of that time; in my poem ‘Our Baby’ from Farewell My Lovely I have the lines: ‘longing /is the matter from which/everything is made’. Larchfield is my grand scale proof of that idea.
So there’s a lot of dialogue between the poems and the novels. But I didn’t write many poems when I was writing the novels. Writing a novel is all consuming, and once I had a publisher, there were deadlines, which I actually appreciated having, but they meant there was no let up. Helen Dunmore was able to do both at once, amassing poems one by one as she wrote her novels. Whatever form I am writing takes over my entire life, spirit and body, however. As Louis de Bernières said to me: the novel is such a capacious form. It can take all your poetry, your philosophy, your dreams.
NC: The (sometimes sniffy) argument is that too many poets are dipping their toes into other genres – but I can’t help but think it historically fairly common. Auden wrote for opera, Percy Shelley wrote his bizarre stage play. Nearer at hand, you mention Helen Dunmore but what other poets, novelists, or poet/novelists interest you? – and – are there any poets who you think, damn, I’d love to read a novel by them?
PC: I recently read Selima Hill’s A Man, A Woman And A Hippopotamus, and it just blew me away. I felt like I had read an entire canon: these tiny stanzas reverberating cumulatively like novels. That book is the most innovative work of poetry I have read since Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband. Tobias Hill was a rare talent in both genres, sadly his career cut short by his illness. What else can you say about your book, Niall? Your work has the powerful hinterland that could drive a novel. I’d love to read that story.
NC: Ah, Selima Hill – we had an interview for PL between her and Nathaniel King a few months back. She has great. And I need to read more Tobias Hill now. I’ll take it as a spur.
For me, I’ve been interested in fiction for a while. Let’s see where the summer takes the current attempt. I finished a manuscript a couple of years back and pitched it out with a small bit of interest – but re-reading it, it wasn’t what I wanted it to be and so I set it aside. Seventy thousand words set aside. But what’s funny is I don’t for a second feel bad about that. It was, what’s the saying, grist for the mill? I think it was a useful type of failure. Useful – in that it taught a lot about the discipline needed to be a novelist. The returning to the page. But I’ve also been thinking of the discipline of the poet – maybe in my own case, the mid-life poet – and the discipline to return to that desk, always on a word count of zero. I can understand why some poets stop and never start again. What do you think about those two disciplines?
PC: It’s a matter of scale to my mind. Some feelings or ideas are meant for a poem: a novel is a ‘whole world’ exploration of an idea, all its facets, all its inner workings. Either way you have to start from zero with a blank page every day. And there is always a reason to stop writing, poet or novelist. There is often no good reason at all to continue. This is the vocation.
NC: Yes, this is the vocation. Definitely. I think that, in the way of old clans, if I had to pick a motto then that would be in serious contention. This is the vocation. Or maybe, ‘There is no other way’. Though my one sounds terrifyingly/wonderfully myopic. Still, there’s maybe something in it.
PC: Each novel I’ve written has a private, driving ‘motto’ I guess you’d call it. I don’t actively seek it out; it just comes. Ocean, for instance had a line from Anne Carson: ‘I’m writing this to be as wrong as possible to you.’ I found this such a powerful idea. Whenever I was stuck, it would reorientate me, stop me trying to be ‘pleasing’ in the wrong ways.
NC: But to end on poetry, it was lovely to see the poem Sculpture, which we were so proud to have housed in the autumn issue of Poetry London, appear as the opening poem to your recently published New and Selected Poems (Afterlife was published by Bloodaxe in February 2026). How did you decide on this poem to open?
PC: I absolutely love this poem; I was filled with the most unholy glee when I’d done it, even though it was working through quite hard feelings. I loved that it synthesised many of the themes my poems wrestle with in all my collections. It also ends with an embrace as the emblem of everything both created and lost — which speaks across the entire book to the final poem ‘Tell Laura I Love Her’. What I realised is that the whole book is not so much a progression as a conversation. The same themes are being cast and recast in different ways from the first book to the last. And in my novels too.
Polly Clark is a poet and novelist, born in Canada and brought up in Scotland. She is the author of four poetry collections and three novels, including Larchfield and Ocean. Her new and selected poems, Afterlife, is published by Bloodaxe Books in 2026.
Niall Campbell is a poet from the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. His latest collection, The Island in the Sound, was published by Bloodaxe Books. He works as a librettist and is the editor of Poetry London. He lives in Fife.
