London poetry journal Long Poem Magazine has recently published Estill Pollock's work, "Lesser Glory of the Snow" in Issue 36 of the publication. The poem is taken from the upcoming collection, Transition States, scheduled for publication by Broadstone Books provisionally in 2028.
In the statement of 'author's process' regarding the poem, Pollock writes,
'My first modest collection, the pamphlet Metaphysical Graffiti, was published decades ago in England, and I still think of myself as a metaphysical poet. Each day I don the ritual headdress of dodo feathers, rat skulls and ATARI gaming consoles, strapping it in place with the continuous feed of early onset dementia test results. After that, anything is possible: ‘Lesser Glory of the Snow’ is the opening movement of the book-length poem, Transition States.
'The poem’s episodic stanzas bleed in and out of their respective spaces seemingly at random, but in fact with conscious subterfuge, a willing hostage to narrative anxiety, that from the disorder may be recognised poetry’s sumptuous arc, its felicity and trigger. The poem is a meditation on the nature of time, the all-devouring tenses that define our sense of place and inhadit our intuitiosns.
'The seeming randomness of the writing is in fact a tooled exercise, where the appearance of lines may be reminiscent of Beat poet Ed Sanders’ ‘freak-beams,’ but worked as closely as Argyll weave. Such jostling for attention is not an unfamiliar concept.
'The later Victorian writers noted the striking verbal effects obtained by the transposition of words from one set of ideas to another, after the manner of Baudelaire's theory of correspondences, where by definition everything is the same as everything else. Beneath quantum theory's ever-decreasing circle of light, one might labour over an obscure Latin text, but Botticelli requires no translation.'
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Estill Pollock's latest publications, as the book cycle Cartographic Projections of a Sphere, are published by Broadstone Books.
