Life Notes

Estill Pollock was born in rural Kentucky in 1950.

He first published poems at the age of seventeen. While at university, his work appeared in the Atlantic Monthly's national selection of prize-winning poems over a three-year period. In the early 70s, he published in Alkahest (Wesleyan University Press) and the Harvard Advocate.

In 1973 and 1974, his first major poetical works ("Oz Verbatim" and "The American Book of the Dead", respectively) were published in Poetry in Chicago, the former receiving the George Dillon Memorial Prize. In 1973 he left Kentucky and worked as an itinerant tradesman in Virginia and Florida. In the period 1973-1975, living in south Florida, he wrote the poems "Letters from the Earth" and "Captain Blood Returns", both published in Poetry, 1975-1976.

He returned to Kentucky in 1975, where he continued to work with poetry in longer forms. In 1977, he travelled to England, living in London, and developed the writing later to appear as "Pendragon", among other works. He married in England, and returned to Kentucky in 1977 for a further four years. The last poem written from this time was the prize-winning "Man from Earth" (c1980), published in Kentucky Poetry Review.
In 1981, Pollock and his family returned to England, to Colchester near the Essex coast.

From 1980, he ceased to write poetry. However, in 1994, he returned to the form, completing "Facing South", followed by "Zodiac Days". In 1996, he published, privately, a pamphlet series of his earlier poems under the title Man from Earth, and by 1998 he had completed a new series of poems later published as a pamphlet by Highcliff Press, a small-press imprint in the north of England.

He continued to develop new titles, and by 1999, Pollock began to market the book manuscript of Constructing the Human, eventually placing it with Poetry Salzburg, formally University of Salzburg Poetry Press. The Salzburg edition was published in 2001.

Pollock continued to develop a range of poems that included sonnet sequences and versions of poems from Rilke and Brecht, together with versions of Anglo-Saxon writings and poems of 10th century China. Between 2000 and 2004, he completed a further three volumes, with Constructing the Human, under the title Blackwater Quartet, after the river estuary near Mersea Island, on the Essex coast, where he lived for many years.

In 2005, a major edition was published that incorporated all four titles, together with the Prologue, "Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours", in a single volume.

Most of the individual poems across the latter three volumes have appeared in various journal publications in England and the USA, including the prize-winning selections in Fine Madness (Seattle 2002, 2004), and in England in Oasis, The North, Poetry Review and Tears in the Fence. Fields and Standing Waves, a pamphlet published in England by Flarestack, was selected as a Pamphlet Choice by the Poetry Book Society.

His next major work was the book cycle, Relic Environments Trilogy. The original volumes, Relic Environments (2005), Available Light (2007), and Designs for Living (2008), were superseded in 2011 by the combined edition, which includes an Introduction by the the author, and poems not available in the previous editions, and was published by Cinnamon Press in the Wales.

In 2021, a new poetry collection, Entropy, was published in the United States by Broadstone Books. This was followed in 2022 and 2023 by two further collections, Time Signatures and Ark, also from Broadstone Books.

He lives in England in rural Norfolk, and continues to write and to publish.