The following review by American poet and novelist Timothy Dodd will appear in the Winter issue of the British journal, The High Window. We would like to thank the editor for allowing the review to be posted here at this time, to coincide with the publication date of Time Signatures.
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Time Signatures
Estill Pollock
Broadstone Books
Broadstone Media LLC
418 Ann Street
Frankfort, KY 40601-1929
USA
BroadstoneBooks.com
https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/time-signatures-poetry-by-estill-pollock
Given the ease and consistency with which the chiseled, image-rich narrative poems of Time Signatures flow, one can get almost complacent in reading them. Make no mistake, however. Estill Pollock's words scorch and soothe. And, not cheaply. With this new collection, there is no obfuscation as to what the veteran poet has placed in our hands: these sets of poems are a moving museum we can carry anywhere, tangible time capsules to open as extensively as we wish. Indeed, Pollock's provisions speak like magical paintings on museum walls whose haunting clarity and force enamor and overwhelm even as they resurrect times and places so frequently erased by more recent and faddish avenues. The poems of Time Signatures are anchored in the past, yet allow the mind to dream, refresh and begin anew, preserving the beauty of lives, experiences and eras while simultaneously keeping them in motion to find new chapters alive and breathing in their drift.
Let me clarify: Time Signatures is divided into two sections—the first focuses primarily on the lives of literary figures (Kafka, Dickens, Auden, Edward Fitzgerald, and others); the second consists of four poems, each taking on a specific painting (Rembrandt, Vermeer, Rubens and Brueghel, respectively). As Pollock mentions in his brief introductory remarks, the poems are unmistakably embedded in biography and history, but not tied to them. Each poem is situated within its own course of events, lives and milieus that the reader can see and touch, but from there the poetic impulse drives, frees and expands, imbuing revered artists with a conscience of their own. In Pollock's hands, lived experiences of crafters and creators are now dynamic moments of humanity and introspection—doubts, difficulties and desires that explore their own artistic output, travels, mental and physical health, and more.
The poems in Time Signatures are histories of creations, but also creations of histories born of energy, flux and imagination. They are facts as fiction and fictions of fact which, more importantly, might show the error of ever believing too much in such a dichotomy from the start. In any case, who isn't enamored when a perceived dichotomy gets lovingly clipped by the joy and curiosity of the poetic principle?
But what does this look like on the page? Examples will say far more than any summary.
"Dickens in Italy, 1844" begins with Boz's own despondence, lovingly rendered:
Chuzzlewit and Twist—inventions of soot
And piecrust drains, until nothing but a shattered soul
Remains of me, instalments of characters driven headlong
To firesides from Blackheath
To Belgrave Square—my mind is coal ash, scrapings
From the hearth, and still the Public clamours
More, more
And from this stanza in "Brecht Translating Shelley, 1938" one sees how Pollock turns historicity to poetics... and vice versa:
I am a breath ahead of the Nazis, my coffin
With its trap door, my gallows noose of soap, a ventriloquist
Squawking names and dates of places where
I am meant to be, living on a small island, in a house
With whitewashed walls—my refuge
From my countrymen, their rhetoric of barbed wire
And iron weather trumpeted from the towers
Of burning libraries
And here is a brief charge from "Auden and the Imagined Life, 1930"—a personal favorite:
My childhood was an album of familial tweed
Like a patient with a cobweb of neuroses—hidden
There among the paper lanterns
In the pines, the arsonist, the past
A tinder twist of public summons and desire
As one sees in these brief examples, Pollock's imagery is a continual cloudburst, and his language true and never forced. Through these vehicles, the poet delivers pathos from the created introspection of some of our most beloved artists. Quite simply, those intrigued by literary figures, geography, history and art should not miss this rewarding collection. These poems are migrant birds returning to give us another look: we remember that which has enthralled us in the past, yet see our subjects now from an entirely new angle as well—our own wings lifted.
—Timothy Dodd, 2022
