Red River Review - Featured Poet Estill Pollock

Visitors to this archive will be aware that much of what is posted relates to new poetry collections and reviews. It's usual to promote, albeit in a small way, these more substantial publications, and publishers themselves have promotional mechanisms of a scope and depth greater than that available here. As such, we're only too happy to leave these matters in their capable hands.

Something that isn't shared widely are notifications of the publication of individual poems or poem sequences in periodicals, whether as digital or print platforms. The poetry collections are often developed around these representative poems, although any long poems are restricted to the collections themselves because of space limitations, particularly as affects print-based journals.

In the collections' preliminary pages, a listing pf periodical credits can be found. Because of the nature of submission windows, choices of poems and response times, it may take months to realise these successes. For that reason, timely listings of acceptances are all the more important, as book publication deadlines approach and the final publication credits are set. It's always with regret that a publication deadline is reached, with a periodical credit notification advised too late for inclusion.

Poems published recently by Estill Pollock, or sheduled for publication in the near future, are included in About Place, Soul Poetry Magazine, Packingtown Review and Vilas Avenue, to name but a few. These 'small press' publications, and others like them, provide valuable 'shop windows' for poetry. Whether through a standard submission process, or through a competition-based format, poets value the opportunities made available through these outlets.

Red River Review, founded in Texas more that 25 years ago and now published in Colorado, has recently published poems by Estill Pollock, in a "Featured Poet" profile for a recent issue of the magazine. The feature includes a commentary on the poems by Editor-in-Chief/Publisher Heather Robinson Hernandez.

'...clarity, resonance and a voice that truly energizes...poems shaped by a distinctly cinematic movement. Images unfold in successions -- shifting, accumulating and returnng, resulting in each element remaining distinct while contributing to a broader interconnected field of perception.'

The poems are part of a new series in development as a forthcoming poetry collection, with many of the individual poems selected through the processes described above. As Ms. Hernandez's comments might be of interest to a publisher seeking supportive commentary for a book, the comments themselves become part of an organic process in a cycle of writing, publication and review.

We hope that readers will continue to support these publications.

One Hundred Views of the Mountain

We are pleased to announce the publication of Estill Pollock's One Hundred Views of the Mountain as an e-chapbook from Mudlark. Pollock's previous chapbook publications with Mudlark include And Then and Working Title.

One Hundred Views of the Mountain, a three-part series of tanka-style poems, is included in Pollock's forthcoming collection, Souvenir Chakras, scheduled for publication in summer 2026 by Broadstone Books.

One Hundred Views of the Mountain

New Review: Parse Poetica

The following review is published as a spring 2026 feature in The High Window, and includes four poems selected from the collection.

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Parse Poetica

Parse Poetica by Estill Pollock. Broadstone Books (broadstonebooks.com). ISBN: 978-1-9666770-28-4.

In Parse Poetica, Estill Pollock turns his attention to the subtle threshold where language not only reports the world but begins to form a world of its own. The title offers a quiet clue. To “parse” is to slow down, to attend to the joints of grammar and the nuances of phrasing, to notice how meaning comes into being through structure rather than declaration. It also gestures, lightly and without didactic insistence, toward the long tradition of the ars poetica, from Horace’s reflections on the art of poetry to Archibald MacLeish’s famous suggestion that a poem should “not mean, but be”. Pollock does not write in the mode of manifesto. Instead, he shares a more tentative curiosity about how language shapes perception, inviting us to consider not simply what a poem says, but how it comes into being at all.

Pollock is clearly fascinated by that process, yet the collection never sinks into technical display. The poems remain grounded in lived experience and in the physical presence of objects, landscapes, and memories that refuse to resolve themselves neatly into abstraction.

The cover image provides an illuminating point of entry. A weathered cherub planter, its torso hollowed by time, now shelters a vigorous burst of foliage. It is a figure at once damaged and renewed. What was once decorative and human shaped has become host to unplanned growth. The past remains visible, but it has been repurposed. This doubleness of loss and persistence, erosion and unexpected flourishing, runs through much of the collection, and I became increasingly aware of it as the book unfolded.

Pollock’s language is measured, stripped back, and often understated. The poems work more by suggestion than by declaration. They rely on implication, on the spaces between statements, on images allowed to resonate without being over explained. Many of the pieces unfold associatively rather than narratively. Connections are glimpsed, then withheld. As a reader, I found myself slowing down. The poems seem to insist upon that pace, trusting that meaning will surface if one is prepared to stay with them.

The world we move through here is insistently tactile. Wood, stone, foliage, weathered domestic interiors recur with quiet persistence. They are not decorative props. They become sites of reflection, holding memory and time in ways that language can only partially approach. There is a moral seriousness in the way Pollock looks at such things. Attention, for him, feels like a form of care. To look carefully is to acknowledge both the presence of the object and one’s own implicated relation to it.

One of the book’s great strengths lies in its refusal to hurry. Pollock resists the neat epiphany or the lyrical flourish that tidies experience into a single meaning. Instead, uncertainty is allowed to remain part of the poem’s fabric. Recognition, when it arrives, feels gradual and earned. The quietness of tone, rarely rhetorical and never showy, gives the poems room to breathe. They respect the reader’s intelligence and invite participation rather than passive consumption.

At times, the lyric surface opens briefly into something more luminous. A phrase sharpens, an image clarifies, and the emotional register deepens almost imperceptibly. Because such moments are not chased, they feel earned. When feeling emerges, it rises from within the texture of the poem rather than as an effect imposed from above.

Two poems in particular, Simile and Nevermind, crystallise the wider concerns of the book. In each, ordinary perception is tilted just enough to become strange, as if we are being asked to look again without the comfort of habit. The language remains restrained, yet the emotional current is unmistakable. For me, these poems echo the image on the cover, not directly, but in the way an image can itself function as a form of language.

Pollock’s commitment to economy and fragmentation can, at moments, be demanding. Connective tissue is deliberately withheld. Syntax fractures. Transitions arrive late, if at all. Readers who prefer narrative continuity or more transparent lyric statements may sometimes feel held at a distance. Yet the difficulty rarely feels gratuitous.

Crucially, Parse Poetica does not collapse into abstraction or self absorption about language for its own sake. Pollock’s awareness of linguistic limits is matched by an awareness of embodiment, environment, and time’s steady pressure. Words both reveal and fail. They illuminate while also casting shadow.

What Parse Poetica ultimately offers is not a thesis about poetry, but an invitation to read, and perhaps to live, more slowly.

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Kevin Morris has worked across secondary and higher education as a teacher, senior leader, inspector, and academic. Influenced by the rise of critical theory in the 1980s, he wrote his undergraduate dissertation on Raymond Williams and his Master’s thesis on The Calendar of Modern Letters, a precursor to Scrutiny. He is an external examiner for teacher education programmes, an A-level examiner for Drama and Theatre Studies, and a school governor in North London.

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Review copyright Kevin Morris 2026.

Parse Poetica publication

Broadstone Books has announced December 15, 2025 as the publication date of Estill Pollock's latest poetry collection, Parse Poetica, the penultimate book in Pollock's series, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere. The book is availble to order from the Broadstone website directly, currently with a 20% discount for direct book sales.

Parse Poetica

The Battle of Maldon

Photograph copyright HJJB 1997-2021, courtesy www.battleofmaldon.org, with free use for personal or educational purposes.

Estill Pollock's new version of the classic Anglo-Saxon poem "The Battle of Maldon" is now posted by The High Window poetry journal. The poem is included in a new collection scheduled for publication in 2026.

The Battle of Maldon

New Reviews - Heathen Anthems and Alias

In its Summer 2025 number, the High Window has recently published its latest series of poetry book reviews. We are pleased to reproduce here the combined review of Estill Pollock's recent collections, Heathen Anthems and Alias, reviewed by Gary Day.

The links to the publisher website are here.

https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/heathen-anthems-poetry-by-estill-pollock

https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/alias-poetry-by-estill-pollock

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Open any page of Heathen Anthems or Alias, and marvel at what you find. The poems are a glittering combination of delicacy and extraordinary tensile strength. Take "Paper Crane," a poem about how ‘the Japanese coax paper from / the bark of trees’. The whole process is beautifully evoked in all its complexity before being exquisitely tied up in the bow of the last two lines.

While each poem is complete in itself, it also pushes filaments out to others connecting them in strange and surprising ways. The word ‘paper’ is mentioned in a number of contexts: simply, as in ‘A Life that made the papers’ ("Skeletons") or dramatically where the ‘poems, a novel and treatment notes’ of James Joyce’s schizophrenic daughter Lucia, ‘were all destroyed’ ("The High Ground"). Paper preserves, but only if it can survive the malice of humans and the accidents of history.

Perhaps both these are less of a worry in our digital world, but as books start to look and feel like relics from another age so the existence of paper, the medium of so much of our humanity, becomes ever more precious. Pollock is sensitive to the forces that have always been brought to bear on the literary. Compared to the ‘Twitter feed’, ‘the blog’ and ‘Reality TV’ poetry is ‘dull’ ("Log In") ’ but perhaps it was ever thus: ‘the test / not blank verse at The Globe, but rough crowds / at the interval, betting / cup and ball games in the pit’.

The literary is a constituent of a number of poems-by definition-yet there is a scepticism about its value. "Bloodlines" packs in Homer, Shakespeare,  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Baudelaire. The literary manifests itself as fragments. These cannot be shored against any ruin for they are instances of that ruin. Faust, Hamlet and Peer Gynt are crammed into one small section of "Bloodlines" as part of a meditation on heroes based on lines in the sand, sand in the hour glass and glass ‘polished until a face shines back.’ Difficult? You bet. And that’s the point.

These poems are intended to stop and make us think. We cannot scroll past them as we do posts on Facebook, Instagram or Threads.  We have to engage, we have to focus. Even then the poems can prove resistant: ‘you may not know all the words / but to recognise the Mystery suggests / you shuffle towards repentance with / something more than shopping vouchers’. The diction suggests that Christianity is not quite dead but it is certainly not promoting the faith. Rather it gestures to the need for something more, something that acknowledges the depth and range of human experience beyond what is catered for by consumer society. It’s not a new cry but the articulation is original.

Just look at the poem’s title again. "Bloodlines." Two words joined together. The first plays on so many different levels, ancestors, descendants, kinship, the blood of the lamb and the very stuff of life itself. The other word, ‘lines’, is also significant. Where would words be without them? Words join together in lines but they are also separated by them. And yet the lines of these poems radiate out to each other, creating connections in a world of contiguity; connections readers are encouraged make for themselves.

The title of the collection, Heathen Anthems, beautifully captures this dynamic. The etymology of anthem comes from the Latin antiphona, a call and response style of music associated with religious services. That’s what these poems are doing, calling and responding to each other. But what about ‘Heathen’, surely a discredited word today with its negative connotations of non-Christian? Whether or not is used ironically or simply as shorthand to designate a spiritually bereft society it certainly evokes a kind of pre-history or deep time which is one of the themes of Alias.

"Frames of Reference" is a good example of a work that shuffles between history and pre-history. It is a quite stunning achievement, an endless source of provocations: ‘In the clock’s carved / face, time, sumptuous / owl flights through sumps / of walnut burl’. The eleven page long poem enacts the flow of time by not having a single full stop, even at the end. This attention to the performative aspect of punctuation is an example of Pollock’s care for the craft of poetry. For example the section in Heathen Anthems, called "The Discipline of Clouds," has the rhyme scheme ababcc.

"Mr Coleridge and Other Portraits" in Alias interrogates the boundaries of prose and poetry. Is writing prose about poets somehow poetry? The narrator is not named but from the clues Pollock gives us it seems that it is Joseph Cottle, the Bristol bookseller who published Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey. The portraits are gossipy, mundane and salted by a publisher’s awareness that poetry should be as much about money as beauty. Perhaps this whole section is a response to D. J. Enright’s quip that there’s no poetry in money and no money in poetry. Alias, as the title suggests, is concerned with identities, a theme that is also explored in the last section of  Heathen Anthems, "The Natural Order." These identities are contemporary, historical and evolutionary. The range is astonishing. Many of them are refracted through literary figures who themselves have no substance. "Double Double" is as an oblique a take on this theme as you can get, with cryptic allusions to the nature of time, Japanese puppet theatre, Macbeth, and suburban adultery. It is a perfect example of how these poems resist precis. They affirm the mineral rich heaviness of language in the face of the set menu of phrases which increasingly dominate our culture. Pollock’s intricate imagery is never less than original his observations never less than profound. These poems do not tolerate the idle reader. They make demands on attention, intellect and patience but the pleasures make up for any pains.

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Gary Day is the author of several books, including Class, Literary Criticism: a New History and the Story of Drama. His poems have appeared in Acumen and Beyond Words. His poem "Anne Bronte's Grave" was shortlisted and highly commended in the Artemesia 2024 Poetry Competition. "About Daffodils" was shortlisted for Vole Poetry Competition 2024 and published in Vole’s Autumn Anthology, Autumn Makes Me Sing, 2024.

 

Alias Publication Date

Broadstone Books has announced June 15, 2025 as the publication date of Alias, Estill Pollock's latest collection in the book cycle, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere.

Copies of the collection can be ordered directly from the publisher website at a 20% discount.

www.broadstonebooks.com