Kittiwake Editions 2005 (OOP)
ISBN 9780954837662
Description: book, 345pp, perfect bound, the complete Blackwater Quartet cycle
The four volumes of Blackwater Quartet are: Constructing the Human, Theories of Fugue, Tsunami Muses, and Adventures in the Gothic, plus a separate Prologue poem, "Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours".
This is a massive work of about 142 poems - I could never get the same number on counting (like Oxfordshire's Rollright Stones). So it presents problems for a reviewer, who ideally needs to devote several weeks to reading then re-reading for a proper analysis, doing justice to the breadth of erudition and technique displayed.
And this isn't negative criticism. Pollock's formal ability as a writer is so assured that it's easy to forget how impressive his control is. I can't think of any recent poetry I've read with a better use of rhyme and meter than his "Prologue": it is superbly readable, with a panoramic sweep over deserts and Essex squaddie towns, 'civilisation' returning to the sands, with the irreconcilable clash between our valueless market-driven society and its ability to suffer and inflict biblical savagery:
The stars trade orbits with our satellites,
obliging lens and data streams new rights,
new horoscopes and rising signs. and we
survey this atlas of anxiety
and are content in our detachment, made
whole, supplicants to GM bud and blade...
This place is anvil-struck with ordinance,
a nation predicted, clairvoyance
from desert wind sandblasting wrecks of tanks...
The desert wind is law. A fine dust, south
from Leptis Magna, settles in the mouth.
There's a slightly familiar tone and use of imagery, from Eliot and (especially) Pound, two other exiled Americans. But in the "Prologue" the pacing and energy is so exciting, this isn't intrusive. My problems started (and mostly ended) with the first volume, Constructing the Human, which seems much the weakest. It features the most personal reflection, and some of it I found very tedious (and almost self-satisfied), especially in the first section, "Versions of Sanctuary":
...without regard
or expectation, yet
arrive in knowledge all the journeys teach
in time, each chance
a true chance taken once...
This seems much too close to Eliot's "Four Quartets", and the effect is wearying when repeated. Displacement and estrangement are clearly essential to Pollock's creativity, but the later volumes are much more convincing, in their fractured perspectives and numerous references and translations: particularly brilliant are versions of Brecht, Rimbaud, and the Anglo-Saxon "Battle of Maldon" (in Theories of Fugue) -
In red combat a sea-soldier
Offa faced slumped dead to earth
before Offa too was hewn remembering
to his ring-giver his sworn word
that together to their settlements
fate would see them home
or else by wound-waste
on pitch of corpses the day turn
My uncle lived in Maldon for thirty years, and there are fine poems in these volumes influenced by the atmospheric but almost featureless Blackwater Estuary. It's also a joy to find referenced Roy Batty's magnificent soliloquy from "Blade Runner" (in "Near the Tannhauser Gate" in Tsunami Muses) - 'All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain'.
The final volume, Adventures in the Gothic, seems to me the most imaginative, featuring fractured identities and some highly unsettling fictive and dream sequences. The technique is less formal, but it's still very controlled, and not 'experimental'. Given the extremity of the material (some if it sexual), this works extremely well (from "Twelve Non-Barbie Episodes"):
Away from the rowdy crowd, this corner
of the bar is my own confessional. My heart
is open to penetration.
From the way I sit, sipping my scotch,
I knew you'd find me...
You'll recognise it,
wrenching upwards, a firework of blood, something living,
the way some people give other people roses.
The last lines of the book (and so the Quartet) seem beautifully apt, without being portentous:
I know how the world is coming
to an end. I write this, not as I was.
Dance with me.
It's near impossible to summarise Blackwater Quartet. In terms of scope and ambition, it must be amongst the most impressive poetry I've encountered recently; especially in writing which isn't trying to be experimental and often follows a fairly strict form (albeit without appearing to).
There's something humbling and admirable in the existence of this massive collection. I'm not sure how wide a readership it can expect, or whether we're patient enough as readers (and reviewers) to allow it to achieve its potential, especially in the mainstream poetry world.
And, to his great credit, Pollock's work completely lacks that 'wry', simpering quality, by which any number of dreadful writers... hedge their position - straining profundity, while pretending false modesty by undercutting things with anecdotage or cheap laughs.
Not to mention that it's difficult to see Pollock involved in all the other nonsense, which sees these 'successful' poets winning prizes, appearing in hagiographic broadsheet puffs and becoming resident poets in Wordworth's Cottage (or Tesco's).
Unfortunately, as Nietzsche said, "It is not enough to possess a talent: one must also possess your permission to possess it - eh, my friends?"
© 2005 Paul Sutton, for The Journal
...
Over 300 pages of poetry collected from the period 1974-2004, the selection is divided into four books, with each book divided into a number of parts. This is pretty intense, powerful stuff, with many of the poems quite lengthy. "Leave of Absence" exhibits Estill Pollock's style, with detail upon detail filling in the mosaic of scene or image:
Windows wide, the faded chintz
flaps in upward draughts, hugs Elizabethan brick.
An old quilt airs across the cill and pantiles, hints
of spring as April clears late mists
though winter chill persists until mid-morning.
The rugs are beaten on the line, dust in bursts
sailing over hedgerows
where startled birds combust.
Estill Pollock, an American, has been living in England since 1981. "Indian Summer" is an American-based piece, rich in recollection, a verdant accumulation of imagery of how he remembers things were:
That August, I walked along the clatter
of cornstalks, kicking through the furrow rows
for flints. I stopped, stooped within the tatter
of river meadow ploughed to suit the crows
examining my finds:the arrow tips
translucent - those serrated edges roes
felt ripping pelt and heart wall - hand-tooled chips
I polished, held to light, recalling rites
lost centuries.
Often poems contain philosophical asides, or observations on life, provoked by preceding images or scenes, again as in "Indian Summer":
... Our lives are kites
of clouds the wind drives out along the air
around us, template for the arrows' flights.
Many poems deal with memory, or the evocation of the past coloured, and to some extent devalued, by the present's hue of regret:
For thirty years
the two returned to summer on the lakes.
The road from Florence was the same,
and the villages little changed.
Across the old town to the shore,
views from favourite rooms remained
true to sunny postcard photographs.
("Mother and Son")
"Emblem Heart" deals with the changing, whirling perspectives both of life and the seasons:
Such memories distract.
The glassy pond is crazed, and the world
swims through its own distortions,
is torn and changed as landscapes change,
climates circle, and the generations are achieved.
We are reconciled to cold,
to water's suppleness suspended.
Many of the poems reach out from the particular to the universal (and vice versa), as shown in this beautiful image from "Meridian":
The universe dismembers a billion stars,
still, light leaks outwards first and last.
The sun's instructions to the leaf
extend the shade at noon.
This is the sound of our next breath.
"The Tempered Sky" fuses passing time and regret with the nature, feel, and look of the universe itself:
The artefact of all our futures gains
midheaven: overhead, the comet's wedge
instructs us in regret, a swordsweep flash
and frenzy of lost time, of worlds that pass.
"Weapons Lore" is a poem inspired by a photograph of the poet's father taken in North Africa in 1943:
The likeness is my father's, the argument mine.
Flemish-bond brickwork, old buildings
in the Federal style, May wine and madrigals:
the causes we die for return
with the personal effects, preserved in photographs,
discovered in hometowns row upon row,
sweeter than rivers or marjoram needles,
as impartial as sunlight on date palm and laurel.
Images of time and space, and the fraility of our hold on them, recur throughout, as in "Pendragon":
There are stars to wish upon,
and stars to keep our love songs honest,
but when the stars in the window pane have gone
and these wilderness endeavours fade,
will nothing else remain
as rule or symbol of the world we made?
In "Fortunate Aspects" Estill Pollock recalls his past in England, also with the same distinctive mix of detail and a certain filminess of style and tone:
We walked in chill October.
The girls were little still, peering down
through pier decking,
watching waves sling dirty spray.
Ultimately the world-view of the poems is gloomy, constantly looking back on the past with a sense of loss and despair:
A degree of uncertainty
separates the present from the past.
The dead appear in my mirror.
More and more they insist on answers.
("Natural World")
He is not immune from plain old pessimism, as in "Plainsong":
Our lives go by to nowhere,
quick as hawk stoop
or a shunted current earthed.
"Local Spirits" also expresses this glum approach in succinct, chiselled fashion:
The life we lived is past. Each spasm treat
and bagged-quail flutter focuses the mind
on whatever else remains.
Indicative of Estill Pollock's preoccupation with the past, other poems evoke historical times and events, whether aerial combat in World War Two, Pompeii, Byzantium, or the Wright brothers' first flight. There is a long poem, "Letters from the Earth", dealing with episodes from the American Civil War, written very simply and (naturally) letter-like, as if by one of the combatants. A poem such as "Seconds of Arc" presents a series of vignettes ranging, for example, from Shelley's death in 1822, to eighteenth century China to Lindisfarne in 633 AD, to Oxford in 1932. A few other poems are in the style ... of writers such as Juvenal, Pablo Neruda, Bertolt Brecht, Rilke, Rimbaud, even the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and so on. There is also a series of poems inspired by a Duke Ellington album released in 1957, itself a montage based on Shakespeare characters.
Even if at times the poetry in this collection is just a little too over-egged in linguistic complexity, and the selection itself could have been pared down somewhat, with some rather rambling stuff reserved for the end of the book which seems to me a poetic breakdown of his style and form into the minutiae of his mind's obsessions, this is certainly deep and powerful work, not to be missed.
© 2005 Alan Hardy, for New Hope International
...
Blackwater Quartet is a provisional selected poems... written between 1974-2004. Pollock is a writer of elemental force who hurls out poetry in copious amounts. It is as if he has bottled the waters of Hippocrene and imbibed them daily for some time. Either that, or Mersea Island...is the home of the Muses and he has them living next door. Swingers in a marshy Helicon.
Who introduced forgiveness, sorrow,
the stupor of my share? I will be filled when you are also,
with courage and beautiful things.
I remember it well,
on the first evening in the one-dimensional bed.
I said to myself, here the turning,
then you approached, put yourself against me,
enabling me desire, and the nght stopping,
the light disencumbered, going quickly from there.
("Fetish Odes")
This poem was published in 10th Muse 13 and is a handy point of reference in a textual landscape that is so wide. It goes on vastly, like an East Anglian sky. But it helps also to define the book, the cover of which is unambiguously porno. This is misleading, but ironically so; Pollock wants to tempt a response he can then neither confirm nor deny. In the 345 pages of this book we can wander at length without seeing bare legs or a cock, but they are there, occasionaly sighted, like wildlife:
Here are my bare legs and pelvis,
embellished with paints, the ones used to shade
my crotch, making my vagina look five centimetres
too far to the left.
("Twelve Non-Barbie Episodes" - Part 5)
Although Pollock's porno poems are amongst his strongest, there is much more to his rendering and re-rendering of poetic inspirations than that. There is no part of poetry that he will not, eventually, include: he has his own version of The Battle of Maldon (creating... contemporary Anglos-Saxonisms), and there are versions of Brecht and Neruda. Pollock's work is an analogue of what already is. He is an Echo of what he is not.
He is one of many Americans living in East Anglia. I don't know what it's like now, but in Cold War times many US personnel would ship over their cars. Tales were told in north Norfolk of them getting wedged in narrow lanes around RAF Sculthorpe... (and) there is something intrinsically American about the size of Pollock's output. It is continental and heavily chromed. Even in a downturn his industry is sublime in its proportions.
The garrison is terraced houses, fenced
between with gardens. Newlyweds, convinced
they'll get their leave this time, together rain
or shine no worries - bad form to complain,
disloyal somehow - it's the regiment
they folow, town by town of army rent,
her flower beds for digging. Orders break.
Routines of practiced force that raise the stake
attend the call to grub, full kit, airlift.
She scrubs and scrubs a stain that will not shift.
(from the Prologue,"Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours")
Pollock is like a character from a Michael Mooorcock novel. There is a mystery in what it is that he is, and in how he exceeds it.
© 2009 Andrew Jordan,for 10th Muse
_____________________________________________
Original cover to Blackwater Quartet book cycle - Constructing the Human (short-run edition)
Book One of Blackwater Quartet
This volume is based on the original Salzburg edition, here extensively revised
Kittiwake Editions 2004 (OOP)
ISBN 0 9548376 3 0
Original cover to Blackwater Quartet book cycle - Theories of Fugue
(short-run edition)
Book Two of Blackwater Quartet
Kittiwake Editions 2004 (OOP)
ISBN 0 9548376 3 6
Description: book, 100pp, perfect bound, thirty-four poems or poem sequences
Original cover to Blackwater Quartet book cycle - Tsunami Muses
(short-run edition)
Book Three of Blackwater Quartet
Kittiwake Editions 2004 (OOP)
ISBN 0 9548376 1 4
Description: book, 87pp, perfect bound, thirty-six poems or poem sequences
Original cover to Blackwater Quartet book cycle - Adventures in the Gothic (short-run edition)
Book Four of Blackwater Quartet
Kittiwake Editions 2004 (OOP)
ISBN 0 9548376 2 2
Description: book, 80pp, perfect bound, thirty-two poems or poem sequences
Kittiwake Editions 2004 (OOP)
ISBN 0 9548376 2 2
Description: book, 80pp, perfect bound, thirty-two poems or poem sequences
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