Ark
Estill Pollock
Broadstone Books
418 Ann Street
Frankfort, KY
40601-1929
USA
BroadstoneBooks.com
ISBN 978-1-956782-43-1
A5
84 pages
From the prolific Estill Pollock this is told in 3
parts, Weather, Waves and Sanctuary. The
personal is here, but here more as a lens on this disintegrating world. All is
detailed, the day's weather first, then the technological climate, digital
downloads and hedge funds, juxtaposition of the traditional alongside and mixed
in with news headlines.
Estill Pollock is master of the telling image. This for
instance, and taken at random – 'A sweat-stain river – sediments banded /
AstroTurf green, shrill-yellow tetrazine, spills / into the choke of gravel
above the village...' Note that 'choke'. Perfect.
Nor does he confine his telling to one place, one
time, one planet. Prolific Estill may be, but he has a lot to say. And he says
it so well. 'The world is frail, each breath the last / Until we wake in older
light, in the counterfeit of days our / lasting memory fire – the fall from
grace...' (“Spirit Animals”).
In the Waves section he moves from a
poem a page to 4 line stanzas, those stanzas 5 to a page of the 10 pages in a
concise, and cynical, description of old London.
A dirty, lawless
Time, windows stuffed with
rags, poles
Jammed in casement cracks
Hung with dank clothes, a
sluggish
rain, children with
stick-horses...
…
Coal smoke, yellow fog
Sinuous through a sickly
City, the wealthy
Fled to their estates, the
poor
Begging pennies for their
graves...
The
second long poem in Waves – “How We Heard the News,” is in the same
format and seems to tell of the 20th century, how the rising
sea levels began.
In the Sanctuary section
we go back to mostly a poem-a-page, with this sanctuary being less of an Eden
and more of an ‘I-told-you-so, here is what we did.’ Sanctuary also includes a 7-page history of
American slavery. “The Time,” though, I
think typifies the many strands of this large collection.
The time is past for all
that, last words
Hanging like thieves at
Tyburn, Sam Pepys leaning
From a window, noting the
weather
And the crowd
Time is past knowing, a
code
Of subsequent revelation,
the diaries
Of the dead simply days
bleeding out to moments
We all rehearse, shy
before mirrors
In quiet rooms
All that is known of time,
tripwire
Escapements or quantum
eagles in the sun, redeems
Each ticking atom with the
winding
Of the key
Breath rallies, then eases - ruse of memory
And a queasy incoherence,
the way priests make signs
To kickstart ghosts
...Time to get yourselves
along to Blackwell's, Oxford....
‒Sam Smith, The
Journal (formally, Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry)
