In their Summer 2025 number, the High Window has recently published their 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.
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.
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