Ark - a New Review

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 20^th 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)