Relic Environments Trilogy
Cinnamon Press 2011
ISBN 978-1-907090-46-2
Price: £11.99 + p/p
Description: poetry book cycle, illustrated, 272pp, perfect bound
Meirion House, Glan yr afon, Tanygrisiau,
Blaenau Ffestiniog, Gwynedd LL41 3SU UK
This new, revised edition comprises the three previous titles in the series, Relic Environments (2005), Available Light (2006), and Designs for Living (2008). It includes poems not published in the previous volumes, an Introduction by the author, and thirteen original drawings commissioned for the book.
Relic Environments
Cinnamon Press 2006
Written in two parts (the first), "Mystery Tramp Eclogues", is a series of original poems, including several longer poems, whilst "Revelations of a Lesser Wife" is a series of poems adapted from the fragments and surviving poems of Yu Xuanji, a ninth-century Chinese courtesan.
This is poetry-writing at its best - confident, original, perfectly chosen language used to maximum effect. Several of the longer pieces build up sharply observed narratives that draw the reader in and make comment with a hint of didacticism - as in the opening piece:
The terrible work went on -
Witchfinder-General Matthew Hopkins
conducting the trials, his ghost haunting the old shop
to this day...
("Elite Syncopations")
There is a real intelligence at work in these pieces, combined with an ironic, but humane, sense of humour.
By all means
Dinner, only I'm a little short on cash
So you bring the salt and wine
Something nice, a little entertainment
And I'll recite the poems about True Love
I've been saving for a special occasion
("The Idler's Miscelleny" [after Catullus])
Descriptions are restrained, highly crafted, but wonderfully vivid and evocative -
On Portland Sand
waters slide - sleek,
a sable halfling creek
of seashell contraband.
The kites, crescents
of hoisted blue...
("The Afterlife of Thomas Hardy")
or -
The fingernails of the sorceress
Fashioned in smoke
A land without climate
A stone buried in ashes
("The Water-Bearer")
Pollock takes us on journeys - to ancient Rome or through landscapes so clearly evoked that they are virtually palpable -
The geography is the key, its contours
nested in minutes and degrees of wind and rain,
slumped cocoanut trees,
the cockroaches shinneying the sweepings
in this remote station.
("Serum Ratios at 36º North")
or imaginary journeys inside the minds of literary figures -
Sir, I too am a student of meaning,
of sounds and recalcitrant hopes, a thing
the tongue holds, turns, and lets by...
("The Plan of a Dictionary, 1747")
The journey reaches its final destination in the second section of the collection. In "Revelations of a Lesser Wife" we build up an intimate, insider's picture of Yu Xuanji, a ninth-century Chinese courtesan, with a remarkably urbane voice that reveals so much in so few words. I have read these short poems over and over and can never tire of them - they are exquisitely beautiful and deeply personal, but also pared down - elegant examples of how to say more with less:
The moon allows too many memories
Lost loves
Autumn wind
Blowing through the courtyard
Takes your breath
The room you set aside
Lamp-lit now
Your hair flecked grey
("Autumn Lament")
The section ends with the line:
A simple flute note carries miles
("The Beautiful Orphans")
These are poems that will carry on resonating after you have read them, and draw you back to them. These are poems to aspire to.
© 2006 Jan Fortune-Wood, for Coffee House Poetry
...
Estill Pollock name-checks Terrible Work in the opening poem, "Elite Syncopations", the terrible work of the Witchfinder General Matthew Hopkins, which sets him thinking a few lines later about Gerard Manley Hopkins, hence the syncopations.
The poems are looking-glasses that let us see how Pollock's mind is always jumping ahead of its references, then bouncing back and forth between the past and present.
In many poems, he puts himself into the role of a historical figure, known or obscure, a ventriloquist act that rarely appeals to me, though there are exceptions here, including the long second part of the book, 'Revelations of a Lesser Wife', supposedly composed from fragments and poems of Yu Xuanji (c 844 - late T'ang), a concubine (lesser wife) who became a Taoist nun, later executed for murder. I say 'supposed' because I can't find Miss X in my T'ang anthologies, but they're always changing the Anglo-spelling, and I'm no scholar. Either way, it's good. If it is a pastiche? Still good.
Pollock has a way with titles: the opening section is called 'Mystery Tramp Eclogues' - Dylan's Mystery Tramp, I suppose. I think he could set up a little business supplying interesting titles for people's uninteresting poems. Some fine individual poems here too, e.g. "Venn Diagrams for Four Terms" and "Anon".
© 2006 Tim Allen, for Terrible Work
Available Light
Cinnamon Press 2007
This admirable collection of poems is steeped in history, with a strong anti-war theme highlighted by persona poems, sometimes in diary form - as in "Ground Zero", where romantic poetic expression combines with desolation of human experiences of war,
... shadows, vapour where they stood, the thin
scrawl of their humanity across ransacked stars.
("Ground Zero")
This early part of the collection reveals a journey across war zones, time, and space. Pollock uses dramatic monologue for a strong emotional impact.
I am crawling through sirens
Through spatter of people
("Ground Zero")
His journey takes us back in time, into the lives of Yeats, Milton, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Shelley, and John Clare. He empathises with these through letters and reminiscences, often in role exercising that poetic faculty that Keats talks about in his letters: Negative Capability.
There are a few more intimate poems showing a sensuality in his work, for example in "Yellow",
...the way she smoothed first one hand
past her dip of waist, then with the other wiped
a sweat bead slow along her throat,
deep into the damp, loose yellow of her dress.
("Yellow")
The third section of the book, "Resurrection Suite", is an interpretive translation of Lyubov Sirota's poetry... recounting, first hand, the events at Chernobyl on 26 April, 1986. It's written partly as a report of the tragedy, but breaks into poetry of absolute poignancy, as,
Our deaths, of course, annoyed them, our lives
described as reckless and extreme, a natural by-product
of error, in fatal repetition.
("Resurrection Suite, 2 ")
© 2006 Robert Cole, for Chimera
...
Another collection from Pollock reinforces past review evidence of the power of his poetry, still coming after the marathon Blackwater Quartet two years earlier. Of more modest length, this collection is sectioned into (I) "Studies in Caesura", (II) "An Almanac of Deeper Dreams", and (III) "Resurrection Suite".
Pollock is no fun read. Lack of humour touched with pessimism pervades, which perhaps adds to line strength and the message that he is not playing around. Indeed, the messages of some of his subjects are vitally serious to future generations. The first section starts grimly with "A Forward Position",
A man whose children were dead, said
this country's a puppet with cut strings
followed by "Ground Zero", depicting the horrors of 9/11, and "Last Days of Ishmael", previously published re the story of Ahab and the whale, which reads as the memory of Ishmael, of Ahab being dragged down to whale-doom.
...the scald-pot seas
red as a cut heart, that day... a shadow
spooling fathoms, surfacing through iron spears,
its white flukes trimmed to sounding cold
for Ahab: his last breath, salt... salt, swallowed
deep enough to make a ghost.
The "Caesura" section also accomodates a variety of approaches in poems, including "On Grafton Street", a Dublin episode of a visit to Yeats long before Pollock; and "Grendal and the Slayer", the tale of Beowulf's heroism. From the latter, ending:
Blood washes the world.
The poem that told it slips from the harp
and scurries, rat-like through rotten straw.
In the hall, in high rafters, a pet hawk, stirring,
keens its yellow eye.
Pollock's narrative skills are fine. However, it's a termination, of Grendal, like Ahab, or the horrific losses in "Ground Zero" - hardly even a figurative caesura in time and space, unless I have missed a point the poet wishes to make.
The biographical nature of "An Almanac of Deeper Dreams" allows some poems to cluster and reinforce the section better. The note is lighter, the technical skill much in evidence, perhaps more telling when the cut-off to death is in memory. From "A Month in the Country":
Seasons are lent, a month in mind restored
in a dynamic of memory.
The trellis of roses
sheltered the view to the cemetary lane.
Climbing through another summmer,
those bright reds were Mother's favourites, their scent fresh
still, as here, circling and circling, this hallmark binding flesh.
"Resurrection Suite", in three sections, is Pollock's adapted version of the story of the Chernobyl disaster from the translation of the work of Lyubov Sirota, published in the late 1980s, she herself suffering, with her son. from radiation exposure. Pollock narrates it in-between the italised poetry, filling us in with the horrors, and the errors made, leading to the worst global disaster and total abandonment of [the city of] Pripyat and its surrounds. Re the poetry and narration, how much is literal Sirota and how much Pollock does not really matter, as the intention (I hope) is to remind and stir a future audience. There's a need to read this version of Pollock - more important than a desire to read,
A gamma burst whitens flowers,
a mystery brightness surrounding
bitter colours
in quiet lanes.
The gag of fruit
ripens too early, plump poisons.
One taste
to send us to the wards.
Most poems exhibit the same forceful imagery. The only quarrel appears in the logistics of placing poems to fit section 1.
© 2007 Eric Ratcliffe, for New Hope International
...
I could tell, about three poems into Estill Pollock's collection, that there were going to be two ways of looking at the task ahead - either the other three books I'd received were going to have difficulty living up to the standard of the first, or, more hopefully, I'd been sent four brilliant books to review, and this was only the first taste of more to come.
Mind you, it didn't stop there. By about five poems in I was becoming more and more over-awed by the quality of this work, to the point that I'm sure I remember myself muttering something into my cup about it being the kind of poetry that makes me want to give up writing. However, that would be to admit having wasted the past twenty-five years in the pursuit of personal literary accomplishment; I was forced to retract my mutterings for fear of the truth.
I suppose the point I'm trying too make by all this preamble is that, if you're the kind of saddo who's only going to buy one poetry book this year, Available Light should be it.
Not only are Pollock's craftsmanship and diction stunning, but these poems simply ooze with an authoritative confidence that encompasses place, history, the moment and narrative drama, with such apparent ease as to draw you in to wallow in the richness of detailed imaginings and realities. Content ranges from Chernobyl to Hiroshima, from war zones to meetings with the good and great of classic literature; from South American conquest to North Amercian upbringing - and all within the space of some sixty-six pages.
Often, there's a raw intensity that serves to mirror a writer who actually cares about his subject matter. The empathy is tangible and contagious. For example, Pollock, in "Ground Zero", talks of
a child running, running,
face sliding down the jut of jawbone, the drip of fingertips
on the burning road,
from high, silver distance, a city sighted,
the crosshair the bridge and river made
marking blast ratios,
shadows, vapour where they stood, the thin
scrawl of their humanity across ransacked stars.
This raw intensity is brought to its climax towards the end of the collection with "Resurrection Suite", which is described as a 'version rather than translation' of the poems in Burden of Lyubov Sirota, published in Kiev in the late 80s. She saw and suffered, first hand, the immediate and long term effects of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl, having witnessed the explosion from the open window of her house in Pripyat, about 1.5 km from the scene.
"Resurrection Suite" takes us through the chronology of the generalised negligence and procedural indifference surrounding the initial meltdown, to the organisational incompetence and technical ignorance of the emmergency response, then on to the official denials and unscrupulous whitewashing in its aftermath, alternating between highly technical detail and the bitter voice of human tragedy.
In the inventory of deaths, our names
are missing, and the grief of mourners
is saved for others.
The wreath never laid, the music never played...
The accident
that hides itself in chromosomes
lingers too in the party line, its sly dismissal of our lives
to lesser maladies.
The bureaucrats on long lunches
took steps, because of us they weighed
the advantages, trading us in kind.
Of course, it's not all doom and gloom. There are lighter moments. Yet, throughout the book, Pollock consistently maintains a level of quality that is both intelligent and absorbing. If poetry is about making every word count, then Available Light has to be one of the best examples in recent years.
© 2007 John Mingay, for Stride
...
There's certainly nothing sentimental about Estill Pollock's Available Light. What light there is, is most often nuclear. These are tough poems that take you head-on into the dangerous dimensions of human experience. Even the poems about childhood and family don't suggest any rosy view of the truth. Pollock's Kentucky country doctor grandfather calls cancer by name, and
knelt in autumn fields
to saw the leg the thresher
only half took.
("A Month in the Country")
The "trellis of roses", when (rarely) there are any roses in his poems, serves to shelter "the view to the cemetary lane"; life is "this slow decay/ to probate and dementia". In his loneliness when his father died, he sits at his writing-desk in the cold room, his "careful poems set-out", looking across the winter landscape. But despite the sad tone, there is a strong lyricism in Pollock's writing that sets its own beauty against the stark realities:
Thinking back, it was the stillness I remember -
at that time of year, at that hour
of the afternoon, the dark coming early, the owl's flight
finishing with a kill.
("Nones")
The opening group of poems deals with situations where life breaks, in one way or another. The commonplace and the terrible co-exist. In a war zone, a group of refugees is huddled round a casualty:
... one of them asked
did we know how far the fighting was, another
asked the time.
Pathos and horror, similarly, underlie the deadened emotions of the soldiers who encunter a woman:
...she said, I want to see a doctor.
The day was an oven, but orders were orders,
and we moved on.
Later... somebody thought maybe
we should have got the kid off her.
("A Forward Position")
Little is said, much suggested. "Ground Zero" was the name given to the place where the first atomic bomb fell, on Hiroshima, in 1945; fifty-odd years later, another devastation severed past from future, "people impossibly flying, arms and legs out-stretched" from the twin towers of the World Trade Center. And other times, other places, other life-shattering incidents.
But Pollock can play a different tune. there's also a series of imaginary vignettes, featuring Shelley, Clare, Coleridge, Wordsworth, etc. A letter from Charles Lamb reflects on the dead Romantics, and there's a gothic tale of disinterring Milton.
The collection ends with a striking sequence, "Resurrection Suite", a re-working of the Russian Lyobov Sirota's poetic account of the disaster at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986, and of its terrible lasting consequences. Hesitant yet powerful, almost inarticulate in their dreadful urgency, these three pieces are a distillation of nightmare.
A challenging collection, wide-ranging in time and space, uncompromising in its poetic honesty, Available Light should find a place on the shelves of all who consider the question of humanity in the C21.
© 2007 R.V. Bailey, for Envoi
...
Pollock, an American who's lived in England for the past twenty-seven years, often writes referentially complex poems that seem to move in multiple directions at once (For a brilliant explication of Pollock's "Preludes for Prepared Piano", see the review from the journal Fine Madness).
In "Curves of Pursuit", Pollock speaks of how he read Edgar Rice Burroughs while he recovered in the hospital ward, dwells on the clinic's displays of an old Dr Guerrant's work among the Plains Indians, and shifts to the Mars Rover landing he saw on television....he imagines our language off the planet, but with different effects.
Before we came, we invented this place,
made weather-models binding hemispheres,
synapse pixels mapping seas
fused glassy by magma burst
... Mariner... Viking...
announcing dust and blister skies, moons named fear and panic
from the Greek- and became ourselves, the way a name
is recalled
beyond the sunburst launch and hieroglyph of rocket trails,
Mars in its ceremonies, its long ellipse
of fire and ice
around a farther, fainter sun...
© 2008 Ludwig Richter, excerpt, WordPress
Designs for Living
Cinnamon Press 2008
Estill Pollock is a mature poet, secure in his abilities, assured enough to play the long game (witness this volume concludes the Relic Environments Trilogy), and like an angler with a lure he spins ideas through sequences of poems, confident his readers will follow.
The opening poem, "Face", explores identity, wearing the faces of the dead, of others - 'these others as we, dreamers in their comas'. It concludes 'The man you were, the face in the mirror: there you are. // Here I am.'
These others whose lives and memory affect our identity, who we wear on our faces, are at the heart of this collection. They are 'the past, its ghosts/devolved to son and daughter, these/others of the blood.' In "A Space in Time", these others inhabit a dream, '...faint energies/ (some I saw right through)/ to share a space in time, its senses recollected.'
Pollock is precise with his descriptive images. In "Everything Else", when lovers walk through rain, it's not romantic rain. It's hard: 'the rain is nails/a rusty thunderhead of cut-wire sharps unloading'; they reach a cliff that 'old continents scrummed vertical.'
There is a move away from personal histories in "Ex Cathedra". A river 'with no memory of itself' flows past a cathedral with reliquary and holy manuscripts, 'the preserve of white-gloved keepers.' in its library, 'The saved dead/thread the margins, anchored in the inks'.
Memories preserved in ink are also the subject of "Japanese Tattoos in the Edo Period", where we find 'characters/for Stay,Remain.// I am everything you made me.'
"The Journeyman's Tale" has an epigraph from Chaucer, and Victorian style intros to four Bukowski-ish vignettes. [In] 'Part the Fourth, wherein Heavenly Music is Heard, and a Wise Woman Reveals the Resting Place of Heroes', the construction worker is shown a bed: '...Andrew Jackson slept in that bed/No fuckin way I said/Yep she says, big as life and ugly with it/She says it come down to her through her great-granny/And was worth a little somethin'. Here again, the passing on of memories to others.
The book is carefully constructed - poems interacting to produce a sum greater than its parts. However, near the centre are four poems that feel awkward: "Tribe", "Field Notes", "Tribe (reprise)", and "Revolution". Each has political overtones, and while these are fine poems in their own way they seemed out of step with the rest of the collection.
The second half of the book is a sequence entitled "Animus" (a feeling of enmity, or the Jungian term for the masculine principle residing in the female psyche - perhaps both - the poems exhibit traits of each - three long poems retelling five Grimm fairy tales in an adult way. These are the highlight of the collection for me, exhibiting evocative storytelling and deft use of language.
"Tales of Wood and Iron" (The Three Feathers, Rapunzel) begins, 'Night and day, for all God's children, the same star/dawn to dreaming, a little breath between/light's constancy/and the cold dark'. In the second half of this [section], 'far from festivals or trade', kidnapped Rapunzel grows '...and the girl's hips/widened womanly' until one day the witch 'caught the man-scent,/buckskin sweat and the spilled seed'. True to all good fairy tales, Rapunzel is rescued by her prince, but each night in her dreams '...she stood, anchored in oak shade/deeper than the world's dark heart, older/than the cold, blind blink of heaven' - an obsidian reflection of the poem's opening lines.
In "The Child-Eaters" (Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel), a pubescent girl climbs into bed with the Man/Wolf 'and pulling the knife/still further, filleted the howl/hissing for air in Wolf's throat'. In a famine struck land 'bellies bloated, guts pinched and heaved with hunger'. We have Gretel pushing the witch into an oven, for a moment 'considering her next square meal...' cannabalisitc overtones that reappear as the poem ends, ominously reiterating 'It was a time of famine.'
In "A Mask of Mirrors" (Snow White), the step-mother Queen is abetted in her murderous plans by a servant she could trust 'not to ...go squeamish when fine talk turned to sweaty jelly'. Snow White exacts revenge: 'ordered iron shoes, stoked and stoked red as a witch's eye'.
'...there was always Death and Judgment' Pollock reminds us in the book's final poem, "Afterward: into the Forest", where we find storytelling, oral history, time, memory, the 'others' that are the preoccupation of this collection, who draw the blueprints we live our lives by, perhaps designs for living, a plan, a map for the path ahead. 'Everything rememberd/Into the forest, the path we took to meet ourselves// These others'.
At 80 pages, this is a dense 'slim volume', with multi-layered intelligent poems that bear more than one reading. It is a book whose paths I shall revisit and I recommend it to you.
© 2009 Derek Adams, for Eyewear
...
Estill Pollock was born in 1950 in Clark County, Kentucky. After a time of living and travelling in the American South as an itinerant tradesman, he found his way to England - Essex, to be exact, where he has lived as a British subject for over twenty years. His collection, Fields and Standing Waves was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2004.
In Designs for Living, he concludes the Relic Environments trilogy that began with Relic Environments, followed by Available Light (both Cinnamon Press), and continues to explore personal and collective notions of time, space, and memory. Time and various ways of measuring his own and a collective past, preoccupy this poet through music, in old ships, in the crumbling of former habitats, meditations on war, the poetry of loss (of his mother, of past loves), the poetry of place. His work is firmly located in the pastoral tradition, one might even say supremely engaged with it, in what Paul Celan termed the 'creaturely path', entering fields, farmlands and the forests of fairytales rewritten, familiar, but also skewed to dislocation, rendered as they are to the brutality of the original medieval stories.
His poetry is elusive and allusive. Initially, this isn't an easy read. You get the impression that you are in the presence of a very robust intellect that just isn't messing around. Detail piles upon detail in an accumulation of imagery that can feel a little over-egged in its linguistic complexity. Often, the poems contain philosophical asides that might prove obscure for the lay reader, and humour is conspicuous by how little it makes an appearance. But this is only at first reading. The payback for the reader comes with the second and third reading, where the poetry really starts to release its gems. Pollock has a masterly way with narrative, a very sensual style and a pin-point, lucid sharpness with language that gives the reader the scalp-shifting joy on repeated readings. The poet has to be commended for being unafraid to write in such a challenging way.
The collection is divided into two main sections - "The Lord of Time, His Curiosity and Galliard" and "Animus", the latter the Jungian term for the masculine principle residing in the female psyche. The former investigates the poet's own past in poems such as... "A Face" - 'The man you were, the face in the mirror: there you are' and in "Torch", which reads like a poem about the one who got away, in which he references Duke Ellington -'mood-lingo'- in a sly reference to his own recent poetic past in "Preludes for Prepared Piano" (Blackwater Quartet 2005 - ed.). One of the more striking poems is "A Journeyman's Tale", which takes its lead from a passage in the General Prologue of The Canturbury Tales, exhorting the reporter of a tale to repeat it as truthfully as he can. "The Journeyman's Tale" is the one narrative poem in this section and stands out because it is told in the first person with an American diction, and brings levity... to what is a very somber collection.
"Animus" is almost all narrative. The poet himself has said that he believed 'that the Long Poem might provide a more symaphetic forum to my often meandering style.' Perhaps that is true, but Pollock is no slouch with the lyric poem. At first glance, the fairytales seem rewritten simply to turn up the volume on the dark orgins. However, there is more going on than meets the eye... Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel, in "The Child-Eaters" (section), are allegories exploring themes of famine, cannibalism, and the dangers of the primeval forest.
Helpfully, the poet has book-ended the two sections with a preamble and a kind of epilogue. These prepare the reader for what is to come and to summarise what has gone. It's worth quoting the words here. From the preamble, 'on the Turing machine':
It can be imagined as something like a typewriter, but having the additional quality of being able to read, or scan, other symbols, and to erase if necessary... a tape of infinite length, divided into squares, with each square carrying a symbol. The machine would then move the tape one square at a time, read the symbol, and either remain in the same state, or move to a new state, depending on what it read. Essentially, it is a device for transforming one string of symbols into another, according to a predetermined set of rules.
And from the epilogue, "Afterward: Into the Forest":
What is spoken was in the mind
Before the stories had names
We saved our pity for ourselves
These landscapes. rivers, creatures, everything recognised
Everything remembered
Into the forest, the path we took to meet ourselves
These others
In other words, this is the join between fantasy and reality, the tie that binds the two sections... these stories of a personal past, a distant past, of ancestry and humanity... before they were ever uttered or written down.
© 2009 Dzifa Benson, for Tears in the Fence
________________________________
Relic Environments
Cinnamon Press 2006
ISBN 0 9549433 1 7 (OOP)
Description: book, 104pp, perfect bound, seventy poems.
Book One of the Relic Environments Trilogy
Available Light
Cinnamon Press 2007 (OOP)
ISBN 978 1 905614 06 6
Description: book, 78pp, perfect bound, fifteen poems.
Book Two of the Relic Environments Trilogy
Designs for Living
Cinnamon Press 2008 (OOP)
ISBN 978-1-905614-48-6
Description: book, 80pp, perfect bound, nineteen poems or poem sequences.Book Three of the Relic Environments Trilogy
No comments:
Post a Comment