Constructing the Human
Salzburg 2001
123 pp.
ISBN-13 978-3-901993-08-4; ISBN-10 3-901993-08-8
£10.50 (+ 2.00 p&p), €13.00 (+ 2.50 p&p), US$ 18.00 (+ 3.00 p&p)
Constructing the Human is an examination of the inner self, a profoundly moving journey of exploration, from the landscapes of the present and the recently remembered past, to the cataclysmic happenings of the past centuries as they have affected him and his forebears. The mood ranges from sombre to melancholy to ecstatic, and carries us along with him as he surveys those people and events which have brought him to this point. This is mid-life crisis resolved in stately iambic hexameters and subtle rhyming patterns.
He holds his material, and us, at arm's length while he orders the various components into manageable stanzas. The resulting book is remarkable, presenting a tension between the orderly shapeliness of the poems and the chaotic content of his own life, brought to heel by the power of language. [...] Through the elegance of his language and the slightly formal style he has chosen to write in, he becomes not the subject of the book, but the guide to a long and complicated journey, which at some time in our lives we all essay.
His long narrative lines, reminiscent of Browning with echoes of that other ex-patriot American poet T. S. Eliot in his erudition and competency with form going back to the classical authors of narrative verse, place him firmly in the great body of English poetry. But the final judgement has to be of content, and in that regard Constructing the Human is an extraordinary book. [...] it is a fine example of the poet's craft in selecting the most appropriate English for the task in hand, searching for the truth, both opening windows into the soul.
Barbara Ellis, for Tears in the Fence
...
If nothing else, Estill Pollock is certainly well-travelled. From birth in Kentucky to iterance in the Southern States to expatriation to England, and a gazetteer of other towns, cities and landscapes along the way, it’s hardly surprising that the major pre-occupation in his poetry is that of place. Yet, only sometimes does he sculpt meticulous observation of his environment into poetry to say much beyond that it’s there, it exists, and we should be, as he has been, awed by its splendour.
There’s hymn enough in voyages
for those dispirited by the old routine
of fences strung like cages
for the keeping-in of beasts and men…’
"Man from Earth"
Awed, too, should we be with his wonderfully erudite diction and dazzling inventiveness in word combinations, an all too rare contemporary skill.
Such lodestars render worlds familiar,
as though light were a fever forever breaking,
and the slow wick these paragraphs allow
were time enough for moons and shadows quartering.
"Captain Blood Returns"
…the parchment of a thousand years decayed,
the list of tithes for their souls’ repose now monkscript
scattered in the evening’s merest rays.
"Man from Earth"
However, Pollock doesn’t stop at one pre-occupation. As might be expected of someone who has lived elsewhere for so long, he returns repeatedly to explore, both through its consequences and emotional complexities, the notion of being a foreigner in a strange land - a position that allows the simultaneous juxtaposition of objectivity and subjectivity in his work. Of course, this pre-occupation bundles easily with that of place, as in any place other than one's own is, to varying degrees, going to make a foreigner, an outsider, a stranger of the best of us.
It is strange, to walk in the scrub of gorse, in this land
which is a memory of the same land for others gone now.
It is strange, to stake a time to the purpose of this island
where crake song evaporates on stone and the wind drives
low along the coast until the brownstone canyons echo.
"English Studies"
And the bundle grows with the third of Pollock’s pre-occupations - the past. As he says in ‘Versions of Sanctuary’, ‘How is it / the present tense / eludes us…’, and again earlier in the same piece, ‘…the paths / the poets took / declining future tense.’ Effortlessly, he makes an amalgam of past, place and alienation.
In that May the April rains continued, boulevards bound
in steely mist and cold for the time of year. As we walked,
grimy pigeons shoaled, scavenger eddies near the Metro
insinuating rhythms where still deeper waters flow.
We returned exhausted to the room, our stamina balked,
wrung by tourists and the tannins in a heady red we found.
"Writing Home"
The significant other in this points to the fourth of his pre-occupations - family, friends and lovers, in their various pasts and places, sometimes sharing in his sense of alienation and sometimes not, often written in such a way as to make a voyeur of the reader, then as a cry for help from the middle of the street - ‘…let me relive my life… rescue time from the guttering wick.’ (from ‘Fortunate Aspects’). On top of all this, given that some fifteen years passed between sections of the collection, his ageing and changing of attitudes also positively influences the terms of engagement he has with the reader when remembering people past - his more recent work being less intimate, more public.
She was shopping when we met, thirty years
and no word but the sound our lives make
like ships breaking up; we said we both looked great.
She remembered her hair in beaded plaits
and that everybody died, gone to hell
or California working in computers.
We stood on ancient ground, in aisles of bread
and six-pack Coke, converts to a toothless time.’
"Leave of Absence"
Though all this is not to say he doesn’t cover a lot of ground, with other minor pre-occupations in flora, astrology, love and war. Nor does it mean he doesn’t take these pre-occupations to their logical conclusions in occasional snatches of philosophical riddle - ‘Consider this: the life one led leads here.’ (from ’Nomad Frescos’) - ‘The past is carried with us, in the oxygen-rush of syntax / and the satchel’s weight of handmedown, collected fates.’ (from ‘ Diary of a Has-Been’) - ‘The ghost walking with you is your own.’ (from ‘Facing South’) - ‘In my rehearsals of the past, a memory / of time to come confronts each traveller, / defines the present sense of things.’ (from ‘Leave of Absence’) - ‘The present simplifies the past, assigning it / a retrospective future, defining who were are, / who we were, and what the difference meant.’ (from ‘A Saved World’), and, finally, in a longer snatch…
We become what we believe,
the nothing of everyday remade, nudged
change by change to imitate a life
as though the world still turned,
turned too, the room within the world.
"Emblem Heart"
What could be argued is that Pollock is too busy with the outside world to do justice to the inner. But this would be too shallow a view. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As a collection, it provides a detailed model of the writer’s psyche throughout a large chunk of his lifetime.
© John Mingay, for Terrible Work
...
De-Constructing the Human
In 2000, Wolfgang Görtschacher, editor of Salzburg Press, invited Pollock to contribute an article to the inaugural issue of Poetry Salzburg Review, to accompany the publication there of a selection of new poems. Görtschacher was interested in writers “reviewing” their own work, although in practice the exercise was less a critique than it was a shared experience of the making of poems.
Salzburg was to publish Pollock’s Constructing the Human in Spring 2001, and the article appeared in the first Number of the journal, reprinted here with some revisions.
1. The Face in the Mirror: Metaphysical Graffiti
On a visit to a bookshop, among the second-hand books, I found a bundle of magazines dating from between about 1940 to 1953. Amongst the titles, there was a first appearance of Dylan Thomas’s “Fern Hill”, “A Refusal to Mourn”, Auden’s “In Memory of Sigmund Freud”, and a London journal in which TS Eliot paid tribute to Thomas, who had died the previous autumn. Touchingly, Eliot urged readers to offer a donation in support of Thomas’s widow and children. Ephemeral by nature, these magazines had a print run of a few hundred copies only, and were never considered rare in any case, bound for pulping, or like these, left to moulder with the contents of an auction house clearance. Reading through the issues, I became aware that many of the contributors represented there, represented too the period referred to as the Modern. In fact, by 1940, the Modernist influence was one of retrospection. “Metaphysical Graffiti” was written to chronicle this phenomenon in particular, as were the other poems in this part of Constructing the Human.
...rakehells quoting Dylan's boys of summer,
dismayed and disbelieving to mourn
the maker of the map of love.
… the interlude extracted from memory’s cold fire.
"Metaphysical Graffiti” represents the death of the Modern period, or at the least our sense of its passing. The reflected figure at the beginning of the poem, corpse-like, becomes the conscious symbol of that passing.
The poem progresses through use of an autobiographical mechanism. References to specific events position the writing within a designated cultural heritage, but the juxtaposition of these events against the rawness of the apprehended present, creates a sense of dislocation that could never be mistaken for nostalgia. 'The razor at the throat perfects the years, time and places traded for a life…The speaking parts are taken.' Other poems in this section of the book are more studied in their approach, if only because, in the Modernist mirror, there is a requirement for the image there to remain fundamentally expressive. In the eyes staring back, we recognise ourselves.
… a vapour of lies, a rogue’s world, edgy— thus,
where mannequin vogues embrace the void.
“Writing Home”
The past exists in recollection only,
some ancient rendezvous we made
configured in the spheres’ acoustics.
“Fortunate Aspects”
… the lives you never save demand your witness and release.
“A Visitor at Madingley”
This view, of the Modern personified as a beautiful cadaver, dressed and decorated for an audience of one— itself, the face in the mirror, self contemplating self— raise the issue of rightful succession. Postmodernism may be a condition of the inheritance, or simply a measure of convenience, drifting somewhere in the ironic distance, or engaged in a desperate vernacular.
I spend mornings pruning stubborn gnarls,
righting listing inclinations of the trees
with preference to weathered whorls.
“Komatsu”
In practice, Postmodernism is no more valid a conceptual process than writing labelled ‘Post-Chaucerian’ or ‘Post-Shakespearean’, to use an established iconography. The term itself is seen as a licence for poets not to engage, except referentially. All movements or schools of writing are programmed for obsolescence. Insistence that the epithet ‘Postmodern’ somehow represents more within a metaphysical structure is specious. The Modern and Postmodern are both relics, because they exist relatively in cultural time.
…nothing has been changed except the unreal,
as if nothing had been changed at all.
“Metaphysical Graffiti”
Whatever the name it is known by, the face in the mirror is always there, demanding recognition.
2. The Long Road Home: Man from Earth
Many of the poems in this section fall into the sub-genre, ‘road’ poems. The poems address travel and travellers, representing in their turn the search for personal identity. The voice, too, is personal, in that events are experienced first-hand, or are integral to the method of reconciliation linking the poet and his past. From the beginning, the elegiac dominates.
A journeyman’s domain, this broken realm of miles and sky,
island clouds, the storm’s remains, archipelago nimbus
adrift in the blue…
“Facing South”
The day is a page from Ovid.
“Weapons Lore”
In “Captain Blood Returns”, the characters are archetypal, the journey allegorical.
… or have the stones of Venice more in common with the clouds
than with the sea’s lit foam, the plasma of ancient stars, or unfamiliar moons
ajar in other doorways?
In the title poem for this section of the book, a sense of place and in it the poet’s sensibility to the past, an acceptance of the human condition, are expressed through simple metaphors.
… I look to my conduct, and see in signs
my life my only true inheritance,
sheltered in that strength of witness
as fate is fostered in the stars. …
…and what will they say of me
when their children’s children ask—
a picture of a gentleman from the century past,
the clothing quaint, the pose uncertain,
the colours in the background faint?
“Man from Earth”
In “Pendragon”, lines of a child-like simplicity lead us into the poem;
There are stars to wish upon, and stars
to keep our love songs honest,
but when the stars in the windowpane have gone
and these wilderness endeavours fade,
will nothing else remain as rule or symbol
of the world we made?
(proceeding then with more authority,)
Time’s grammar shining like a birthstone,
shall it be cut in courtly flourishes,
or do we inhabit a round morality,
turning on a dream?
The myth of the Eternal Return is examined in the closing sequence. The progressive layering of imagery seen previously in the poem, ‘a world engaging its own horizons in relentless integrals of blue’, succeeds to one of brutal recognition.
I wish without anguish now:
waiting for equinox and the Lord’s elect,
determined to winter here
washing the corpses.
“Zodiac Days”, another poem of measured, reflective language, concludes the section. The themes of time and identity are recurrent;
…wind emblem, time’s high hawk
a falling flame, the same years passing for you,
for me, always the same years passing.
… We meet in dreams, in a strange country
on paths we name as the hour of our birth is named…
(where)
The dead rise up and circle the moon,
long, tree-rimmed, corpse-woven light
bright as the world, the presence beside me,
rivers of stars.
3. News from Nowhere: Versions of Sanctuary
The number of poems in this part of the book, and the stylistic variety of the writing, make the listing difficult to sample effectively in an introductory article of this kind. However, as many of the poems share themes in common with the poems in the previous sections, it may serve to select a few passages as representative, and allow readers to examine the poems at length and at their leisure.
In the tales of central Europe
the dead walk, and farmyard creatures
solve the riddle at the world's heart.
In our lives, the leaves of autumn
fall irrevocably to earth,
and allegiances are buried
to the depth of memory, each
weighted with unforgiven pain.
“Octaves in C”
Excitable atoms, busy bird shapes
in slippersoft configurations
whirl above your head.
“Constructing the Human”
…the patterns of enamelled flight where each
repeats, repeats within the mind to leave
a witness trace, so vagrant icons teach
an iridescence hovers out of reach.
“Nomad Frescos”
It is a language of remembered forms, the marsh dawn lemon on emerald
and the day waiting to be named.
“The Bell”
High in the cedars a tatter of crows
against the crushed red of October light,
our own steps sharp in frosted sequence—
who could have known all was mist
and vanished as it came, zero presaging zero?
“Emblem Heart”
This chance, believe as I believe that all
things possible begin as we began, conniving towards an immortality.
“Signatures in Time”
A weight of breath is all that holds us here,
a keepsake anchor for our little lives.
"Conditons of Service ”
… I wait for you in hours
no longer than the time
it takes to mend the world, a pressed-leaf time,
familiar, luminous at the poles.
“Sailing By the Stars”
Within the process of self-examination, through which we become more conscious of our place within a physical space seething with phenomena, the experience of poetry remains personal and revelatory.
© 2001, 2004 Estill Pollock
_________________________________
Oasis # 103
A literary magazine with a longstanding bias in favour of the British poetry scene's small experimental fringe - unlike many such publications, Oasis at least does its thing intelligently. Take, for example, the eight poems by Estill Pollock. In places, Pollock's work is perhaps a little obscure, but unlike much experimental poetry, nowhere does it descend into the realm of complete gobbledegook, and "Names in Birth Order" [from Tsunami Muses - ed.] is a fine poem indeed.
© Kevin Higgins, for New Hope International
...
Oasis Broadsheet #3
I found Estill Pollock’s two translations from Rilke enthralling but I must qualify that by saying that I am no Rilke expert, and I have no idea how closely these versions of two of Rilke’s most famous works resemble the originals. All I know is that they compare very favourably with some other translations I have encountered of the same poems. The second verse of ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.’ is already a favourite of mine, however prosaic the translation: this is Pollock’s adaptation.
Beyond the rocks a mist without memory
or ambition, a forest lost for form and there,
spanned by ribbon bridges the lake’s blank face
and depth of pitiless, grey immutability.
Through a sufferance of grassland the pale path rose,
just the width of one direction, thin as the thread
unravelling from her shroud.
The translations of five Sonnets to Orpheus have tempted me back to Rilke again after some time away from him: “The earth we remembered, its weather sly / with beginnings, crawls / out to meet the rain.” A wonderful reminder of the power poetry can muster.
© Tim Allen, for Terrible Work
...
Rilke's masterpieces continue to fascinate, and these lyrical reflections show the narrative to be as compelling as ever; the song endures. "Now she was the rain, water's braids unbound./ Now she was harvested, now she could answer/ as a sustenance,// a being rooted in being..." If you read it in your garden the trees will dance, apparently.
© Andrew Jordan, for 10th Muse
...
Fields and Standing Waves
Flarestack (2004)
POETRY BOOK SOCIETY Pamphlet Choice, 2004
If the overriding task of poetry is the ability of a poem to shift slightly on every reading, the beauty of rhythm, the authority and weight given to language, and the way words slide off the tongue, then Fields and Standing Waves by Estill Pollock... definately stands out as having achieved all this. It is quality writing. Every word deliberate yet delicately placed. [His] work is... pastoral, entering fileds, farmlands, and forest, using the natural landscape to illustrate social/political issues. Here is a collection powerful enough to be read time and time again.
© PBS Bulletin, Winter 2004
...
Fields and Standing Waves is a hefty collection. It was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2004. Pollock, an American poet, living in England, has brought together ten long poems, contemplative sequences couched in pastoral lyrics. The poems move across imagistic landscapes with cinematic sweeps:
in a ditchwater sky the sun a hawkshape
faint above the cedars.
("Rules of Engagement")
We can find in this collection meditations on war, fairytales rewritten, the poetry of loss, the poetry of place, rich narratives that blend with dense imagery and a lilting cadence.
The longer narrative poems might benefit from compression. You can hear the early Larkin at times, when the philosophizing takes over, but it lacks Larkin's brevity. As you'd expect, within these longer passages you can find gem-like phrases. But the longer poems that make up the bulk of the volume read, at times, like rich prose cut up. The more successful of the longer poems are divided into self-contained units, such as "Local Spirits", a sequence of fourteen sonnets that begin in East Anglian farmlands and has a range of references that includes the Bible, Elvis Presley, and travels as far as Peru. The wealth of reference in "Seconds of Arc" includes movie and literary history and stretches from Oxford to the Orient.
Too much of the collection smacks of the nineteenth century. I thought of Elizabeth Barret Browning when reading "Inventions in the Pastoral". It was only the references to TV and Microsoft that reminded me that these poems were published in the twenty-first century.
For all the breadth of these poems, the ones that really work are the shorter ones, such as "Remote". And all this suggests that Pollock needs a good editor, an Ezra Pound (whom Pollock mentions) who would take a blue crayon and strike out the messy padding and leave us with the lyric moments and the imagistic beauty that makes this collection worth going back to.
© Wynn Jones, for White Leaf Review
...
"Pollock, Ellington, and Shakespeare"
(originally posted in Fine Madness)
In "Preludes for Prepared Piano", Estill Pollock takes as his inspiration Duke Ellington's album of 1957, "Such Sweet Thunder". Ellington's compositions in turn are his tribute to Shakespeare's works as he experienced them at the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival. Each of Ellington's pieces is a musical rendition of some Shakespearean conflict, scene, mood, or personality.
Pollock's section titles are drawn from the titles of Ellington's compositions. The first title, "Such Sweet Thunder", is quoted from "Midsummer Night's Dream", Act IV, Scene 1. Here's the relevant passage, starting at line 107:
Theseus: Go, one of you, find out the forester,
For now our observation is perform'd,
And since we have the vaward of the day,
My love shall hear the music of my hounds.
Uncouple in the western valley, let them go.
Despatch, I say, and find the forester.
(Exit an attendant)
We will, fair queen, up to the mountain top
And mark the musical confusion
Of hounds and echo in conjunction.
Hioppolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,
When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear
With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear
Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,
The skies, the fountains, every region near
Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard
So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.
In a sense, this passage describes an aesthetic: not the music of delicate harmonies, of balance and resolution, but the music of discord, of incongruence. The messy, unresolved music of discord could describe some forms of American jazz, but it could also describe the movement of "Preludes for Prepared Piano".
Stylistically, Pollock's poem has a lot of surface roughness - it's untidy, incongruous, unfinished, in an American, Walt-Whitman sort of way. It's elusive and allusive, and shows Pollock's usual flair for suggestive, even humorous phrasing. The poem is, as Ellington's album is, a montage: Pollock plays off scenes from Shakespeare's plays, draws from the personal and theatrical experience, works in a bit of jazz, combines the archaic and the techno-modern, and is playful all around.
Pollock's poem repays study. For example, in the first section, Pollock takes his cue from the hunting dogs of "Midsummer Night's Dream" and runs with them (so to speak), quoting 'one mutual cry' to describe the hounds' whining, squealing, and yipping in the woods. Then the poet sees the dogs in the night sky, the greyhounds of Boötes. The last two adjectives in the section are a good example of Pollock's inconguence: the primitive combined with the techno-modern, 'feral', and 'hi fi'.
Pollock is capable of writing tight traditional sonnets. However, in "Sonnet for Caesar" and "Sonnet for Hank Cinq" (drawn from "Julius Caesar" and "Henry V", respectively), he follows Ellington's lead in treating the sonnet in the archaic sense of 'sonnetto' - little song - a synonym of the modern Italian 'canzonetta'. And, like Ellington's pieces, Pollock's lines are long and slow, keeping to their own pace.
In "Lady Mac", Ellington describes his tribute to Lady Macbeth as a 'ragtime in her soul'. Pollock begins his mélange with the language of jazz, shifts to wry commentary on the play, and brings Macbeth into a present of sexual and psychological complications.
In "Sonnet in Search of a Moor", Pollock continues the complications of the previous section. He starts with the play itself, but soon shifts to "Paradise in Harlem", a 1939 crime film out of the Harlem Renaissance, combining gangsters, jazz and blues, and a passion for "Othello".
"The Telecasters" are the three 'weird sisters' who telecast Macbeth's future. In this section and the following, the ever-relevant tensions and violations of time and place are re-enacted through various forms of art - theatre, poetry, and of course, music. In "Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)" - taken from Puck's maneuvers in "Midsummer Night's Dream", Act III, Scene 2, - Pollock invokes the language of the comedy with 'here comes my messenger' and 'foolish mortals', and reminds us of its idyllic play, good humor, and movement.
"Sonnet for Sister Kate" alludes to Katherina in "Taming of the Shrew". In this section, as well as in "Star-Crossed Lovers" and "Half the Fun" (the latter referring to Cleopatra's separation from Antony), Pollock takes up the ambivalences of love and desire, of distanced relationships and 'the listening position'.
Each section starts a new movement, a prelude, in which we hear multiple themes in 'mutual cry'. Yet, as Pollock says in "Madness in Great Ones", his riff on Hamlet, there is also a 'wordless presence' in this poem.
In his final section, "Circle of Fourths" (referring to Shakespeare's great contributions to tragedy, comedy, historical drama, and the sonnet [and the musical notations in jazz - ed.] , Pollock takes us beyond the 'sacred boundaries' where everything 'is outlined in black', where 'the rest is silence'. As long as the music lasts - 'droney, model counterpoint' - we listen to 'the simultaneous telling of stories', tunes that paradoxically place us in the confusions and separations of our world, even as they suggest transcendences of time and place.
What Estill Pollock says about music could equally apply to his own preludes: 'The work is an inspiration for the shape of the mouth'. Like Puck's magic, Pollock charms us with his music, and wakes us to mortal time.
© 2004 David Edelman, for Fine Madness
...
Tremblestone 4
I quite enjoyed Estill Pollock's "In Isika" [from Adventures in the Gothic - ed.] which is an evocation of a time and place - 'Not always geographical, any place,/every place, perhaps I'm there right now.' - mixing historical reconstruction with rich ritual celebration. There are moments of intensity which are powerfully material in the sense that the feelings evoked are preceded by vivid descriptions of people and places. At the same time there's a strangeness to the whole piece, almost a displacement which removes the reader from the cameos described. I'm beginning to speculate that the effect of the internet and cyberspace might be having a profound effect on our notions of time and space, and therefore our sense of 'reality'.
© 2005 Steve Spence, for Terrible Work
...
10th Muse
And by reading [the poetry] you have just become a part of the process. It spreads from the centre to the periphery.
© 2005 Andrew Jordan
...
Estill Pollock's "The Child-Eaters" reworks the stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel, exploring the themes of famine, cannibalism, and the dangers of primeval forest. Pollock's uncompromising and sensual style both renews these tales and takes them back to the brutal medieval world from which they came. The path he follows criss-crosses that explored by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber. Where Carter amplified latent archetypes, Pollock focuses on acts of ingestion in which 'it was a time of famine' is an excuse rather than a justification. The wolf that eats the grandmother has just gorged itself on her goats. The witch that plans to to eat Hansel and Gretel lives in a house made of food. In his poem, the primeval forest might be a metaphor for modern institutions, such as a children's home or an asylum or a prison. In Pollock's telling of these tales, nothing is transformed. The jewels found in the dead witch's cottage are not symbols of a spiritual or psychological wealth gained through experience. They merely represent money:
They took the jewels
and shared them out, and things were better for a while,
but jewels are not bread, when there is no bread, nor grain to mill,
when there is no grain, even with only three mouths to feed.
It was a time of famine.
© 2008 Andrew Jordan
...
[The following review was of the Spring 2022 number of the British publication, The Journal.]
... Pollock's
poem "The Night Watch" could be seen as a run-through of Rembrandt’s life, using the
famous painting as a hook, but Pollock writes so well it rattles along, full of
conversational phrases and vivid images. Sometimes the style is loose but never
uneconomical, as in Rembrandt’s apprenticeship:
Rembrandt, eighteen, yawns – drudge Apprentice
To still-life squibs of pelt and pear, to infill
Landscapes
with distant hills, windmills or
The
lowering skies favoured by the Master for yet
Another
version of Apocalypse, the genre
And his screw-loose boss both
Long out of fashion
...her root-vegetable features ...
and (with) Rembrandt as a jobbing young painter picking up commissions where he can:
And butterball daughters.
Crashing
lath-and-plaster, Saskia shouting up the stairs
For God’s sake you
blockhead you ruined the stew.
(Saskia, to note, was the artist's wife and sometimes-model.)
It’s this kind of detail that gives the poem its life and vibrancy. Yes, it tells of Rembrandt’s life, and is therefore a biography, which can feel a bit wooden:
In 1638, he buys the Breestraat house… [The line is in fact an alexandrine - ed.]
but...even in this, Pollock is playing with the subject, with the task he has set himself. By including the incident of the insane 1985 attack on the painting Danaë, he takes the poem on to a new level, a consideration of the fragility of what we achieve, if we attempt some kind of art, and puts words into, or quotes, the perpetrator:
All
strangers, paid in day-rate ale.
I enjoyed the poem, its images and language, and it set me off in search of an old book of Pollock’s, from 2005, published by Cinnamon Press, called Relic Environments, which I’ve kept, and which is well worth exploring if you can find it; I’ll try to review that soon.
He had a book published in the USA recently but I don’t have that. It may be easier to find. [Entropy, Broadstone Books, 2021 - ed].
© Bob Mee, 2022
...
Entropy
Broadstone Books
ISBN
978-1-937968-92-2
$18.50
The word 'entropy' derives from the Greek for transformation. It's come to mean an unravelling into chaos. There is a good deal of chaos in this book, much of it generated by war; but for me, the real meat lies elsewhere, in the more domestic, familial work, much of it in the second section, Goners.
me, a little, our cup of tea
enough to
stopper the mind's drift
a moment...
"Christmas Island, 1958" left me white-knuckled with fury for the young men used a guinea pigs to test the effects of a nuclear blast, the story told simply, dispassionately, and all the more effective for it.
The timely "In Kiev" gives us some historical background to the current crisis:
A blade's edge
There is much in this book that's contemporary, as in "Monster," a sprawling beast which echoes Covid's unstoppable path, its pacy gallop, (its) guttural gasped syllables adding frenzy to the lines and our memories:
Part Three, Water Harp, consists of smaller, sketch-like verses, each named for its opening line, as if taken from a notebook found after the author's time, each a snapshot of a moment, a feeling, a day, a colour:
Time unrecovered, the sap of
entitlement
And tomorrow
This is a book to mull on, long after you've devoured the final line.
© Melissa Todd 2022 in The Journal (England)
...
No comments:
Post a Comment