Souvenir Chakras - New Poetry

Broadstone Books has announced June 15 as the publication date for Estill Pollock's latest poetry collection, Souvenir Chakras. The title is available to pre-order, with a discount for customers ordering directly through the Broadstone Books website. The book will be available through other general outlets in due course.

'With Souvenir Chakras, the seventh and final title in Estill Pollock's book cycle, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere, we find poems of shape-shifting complexity and with a metaphysical pedigree of subject and voice.

Here, a narrative of Charles Dickens and Edgar Allan Poe offers a thoughtful and provocative examination of literary personae - here too the timeline tanka cameos of "One Hundred Views of the Mountain," its closing sequence presented as the fictional diary of a court lady in ancient China, defining the inherent jeopardy of transient cultural identity.

With the inclusion of his treatment of the timeless "The Battle of Maldon" and the memoir-styled "Analogue," this volume is a worthy companion to the previous collections in the series - Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, Alias and Parse Poetica, all available from Broadstone Books.'

Souvenir Chakras

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.

_______

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.

_______

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.

_______

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

_______

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.

 

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

Mudlark 'Flash' Titles

The poetry e-journal Mudlark has published a short ('flash') series of Estill Pollock's poems, "Three Descriptions of the Colour Red," "Sirens" and "Names in Birth Order." The work will be included in Pollock's collection, Souvenir Chakras, provisionally scheduled for publication in 2026 by Broadstone Books.

Other recent periodical publications include poems in Poetry Salzburg Review, The Crank and Last Leaves.

Estill Pollock at Mudlark

Alias and Other Forthcoming Titles

Following on from the publication of the recent Heathen Anthems collection (December 2024), we are pleased to announce that Broadstone Books has confirmed the publication of the concluding titles in Estill Pollock's book cycle, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere.

The first of these, Alias, is scheduled for publication Summer 2025, followed by Parse Poetica later in the year. The final title in the series, Souvenir Chakras, will be published in 2026.

The earlier titles in the series, Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark and Heathen Anthems, are still available direct from Broadstone Books and from other online outlets.

Heathen Anthems - a new poetry collection

A new poetry collection, Heathen Anthems, the latest in Estill Pollock's Human Resources book cycle, is now available from Broadstone Books in the United States. A 20% discount is available for orders placed directly with the publisher.

Other titles in the series to date, Entropy, Time Signatures and Ark, are also available direct from the publisher website as well as through Amazon and other outlets.

Heathen Anthems

__________

Praise for Heathen Anthems:

'Reading Heathen Anthems, I find myself thinking: What is poetry, if not language in its finer tuning? Estill Pollock is a virtuoso in a world out of tune with itself and "indifferent to our preferences" he is writing poems that can and will, if we let them, help us carry on with our lives with our temperament and sanity intact. Heathen Anthems is a book to keep close, a book to return to and return to.'

- William Slaughter, editor, Mudlark, an Electronic Journal of Poetry and Poetics, and author of Untold Stories and The Politics of My Heart

'Master of the telling image.'

- The Journal (formally, Journal of Contemporary Anglo-Scandinavian Poetry)

 

Working Title and Other Poems - a new e-chapbook

We are pleased to announce the Mudlark e-chapbook publication of Working Title and Other Poems, a selection of Estill Pollock's recent longer poems.

Two of the poems, "The Sirens" and "Local Spirits," are included in the new collection Heathen Anthems (Broadstone Books, November 2024) together with "Cartouche," "Working Title" and "Watchman" from the forthcoming collection Alias (2025). Details of availability of these titles will be posted here in due course.

To view the poems, please follow the link below.

Working Title and Other Poems

Brecht Translations (selected)

A recent posting of Estill Pollock's translations of (selected) poems by Bertolt Brecht, included in a recent post by the High Window, is available here.

A Poetry Reading

An unusual post here, in that Estill Pollock undertakes few public readings. The poems here are selected principally from his recent collection, Ark, with subject reference to political and socio-environmental issues.

Estill Pollock poetry reading.

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)

 

New Poetry: "The High Ground"

We are pleased to offer Estill Pollock's long poem, "The High Ground," as published by The High Window. 

The poem is included in Pollock's forthcoming collection, Heathen Anthems, scheduled for publication autumn 2024 by Broadstone Books.

Please note the 'Aral Sea' image is offered by The High Window, whose editors take sole responsibilityfor copyright clearances.

The High Ground

The Drunken Boat - a New Translation

 We are pleased to share The High Window's recent post of Estill Pollock's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "LeBateau Ivre." 

The Drunken Boat

NEW: Frames of Reference

Estill Pollock's new long poem, "Frames of Reference," is now published by Mudlark as part of their 'Flash' series of standalone publications (No.172). To view the poem, follow the link below.

Frames of Reference

Ark - New Poetry

 

Estill Pollock's latest poetry collection, Ark, is now available from Broadstone Books. The book can be purchased online through major outlets and at a discounted price direct from the publisher's website.

The collection is available in the UK through Blackwell's (Oxford) online catalogue.

We are pleased to include here a recent review of the collection by author Timothy Dodd. 

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

Ark 

Estill Pollock

ISBN 978-1-956782-43-1

Softbound, 83pp

$26.00 RRP/$19.50 (publisher) 

Broadstone Books 

Broadstone Media LLC 

418 Ann Street

Frankfort, KY 40601-1929

USA

BroadstoneBooks.com

[NB. Ark will be available in the UK through Blackwell’s (Oxford) online catalogue.]

Wasting little time to follow up last year’s Time Signatures, Estill Pollock’s new collection pulsates with urgency and echoing haunt. While maintaining the lyricism, gait, and rhythm of its predecessor, Ark moves from a focus on history and nostalgia to something that feels much more immediate, more pressing, and is in some holistic way an addressing of the Now. In places such as Part Two’s Waves, “London in Those Times,” an exquisite ten-page poem looking closely at life in the 19^th century metropolis, Ark is every bit as historical as Time Signatures. “Battersea Reach from Whistler’s House” would also fit quite snugly in the previous collection; poems circling around Kabul or Texas cheerleaders, however, not so much.

Yet make no mistake, Pollock’s conversation with the present is not shortsighted syrup or a modern glaze to mirror the lifestyles, ideology, and aesthetics of the so-called contemporary age. Pollock’s world view is not tethered to a narrow-minded preference for our own epoch and location, and in fact laments that we seem to wallow in them and fail to reach for any greater understanding. As such,wired by lexiconic virtuosity, these poems move far from the backyard boardwalk into all directions of space and time (historical, prehistorical, a-historical and mythical) while carrying our own short moment of human experience through it all.

Indeed, the overall thrust of Ark comes from an interwoven examination of where humanity currently sits (or stands) in our journey upon earth. Along the way, and particularly evident in poems such as Part Two’s “How We Heard the News,” the veteran poet ponders how much more our age can consume, asking how and when we will come to terms with our vast post-industrial sowing. Take the ending to “Iron Gutter Eves,” for example, the fourth poem in Part One (Weather): 

Now empire, heavy water tars, Dhaka

Denim mill race, death cycle rivers, fish ghosts

Sprig nets acid orange, pall indigo testament

Download, old altars

 

Older gods

Yet this snippet reveals much more: that readers must ultimately come up with their own questions and conclusions, for Pollock’s poetry is nothing if not images and snapshots of the moment, foregoing ideology and the scourge of sermon. Still, there is no absence of urgent voice-bubbling within the imagery, and one need not trample halfway through the collection to find it.

It must be stated that it takes but a short flip-through of the book to note that Ark’s major, generalized theme is “weather.” Global warming and the catastrophic changes due to it have thrusted the modern, industrial world’s concern with climate far beyond those inconveniences countered by sunglasses and umbrellas. Yet Pollock is a poet, and a visionary one, not a TV weather forecaster. His lens is not narrow and when a thundercloud appears over the front lawn, one can be sure this means more than an afternoon of gardening ruined. This is to say that any close reading of Ark will reveal that weather and climate are much more a vehicle than simplistic theme, a topic of transport that takes Pollock’s poetry wherever it wants to go. “Snow Snagged in Hedges,” for example, is a poem that ultimately delivers us toward quietude, a poem that feels as if we’ve just turned off the lights to eternal sleep. And then after “long cold” and “dry winds,” in the poem “In Places We Invent,” a haunting little poem echoing humanity’s ultimate ineptitude, carries us to a place birthed by a line like this one:

Outside, a dead lung, a thousand years from Earth

Numerous other poems of the collection, poems like “Under the Sahara” and “Neanderthals in Paris,” forge trips via the weather toward those greater contemporary ironies, indeed hypocrisies, mentioned above. In Ark, Pollock reaches into all manifestations of climate, evoking and calling out aspects of the weather that signify the greater elements and earth itself, moving us toward the primordial as well. Landforms, natural disasters, geography—we are transported by words toward an understanding whose magnitude very quickly wraps us up in transformation, from the simplest concepts of weather into all things life, existence, and the interrelated human experience.

Ark begins to feel even more personal in Part Three (Sanctuary), digging into our choices, behaviors, tendencies and experiences as human beings, our own gales and tremors, our own droughts and soakings that are not separate from the natural world even when we attempt to keep them distant. Much of it is seen in the poem, “A Song.”

[…]

 

The winking jet exhaust, so high

And far, attracts ground-to-air response

Like whale song sounding in the deep, and still

Artillery cudgels orphans in their cellars—the ceasefire

Ragged as the curtains

 

On railway platforms we say goodbye

To little lives, to little preferences

For park-bench chess and Sunday roasts, with

Everyone aboard and visas stamped

As we return to shell holes named for cities

 

The gristle of burnt terrain

Is ours, patriot frenzy or cool resolve, both

With their place, where unclean spirits

Stew in native fire, met each to each

With songs of blood and heaven out of reach

 

More importantly in my view, in its illumination of all things related to weather, Ark ties everything that is ‘us’ to that which not only preceded, but that which comes after humanity. Lines from “A Thundersheet” read:

Deeper than the first grave, time sleeps

There is neither rain, nor the memory of it

This meeting with the primordial is alive in “Spirit Animals” as well, whose final stanza exhales:

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

That ends as it began, our shadows flickering

Across cavern walls

 

As such, Ark is a whirlwind, a blasting volcano, a far-reaching tsunami, and cumulatively haunting. It is at once focused and all-encompassing, outward-looking in the extreme while simultaneously introspective. Suffice to say, it is a mature collection from a poet whose world view is as immense as his poetic talents. Estill Pollock’s Ark, as with his greater body of work, should not go unnoticed.

 

—Review by Timothy Dodd, author of Modern Ancient and Fissures and Other Stories, first published in The High Window

 

A New Review: Time Signatures

 

Time Signatures

ISBN 978-1-956782-14-1

Broadstone Books

418 Ann Street

Frankfort, KY

USA

40601-1929

[NB: Time Signatures is available in the UK through Blackwell’s (Oxford) online catalogue.]

 

‘Estill Pollock, a native of Kentucky, has lived in England for forty years.’ This is part of the blurb on the back of Pollock’s book; this is useful information. The debate rages with regards to the importance (or not) of a writer’s life. It’s important in this case, as Pollock is a poet whose work I’m unfamiliar with, yet I recognise magazines singing his praises. It’s also important when we consider the work itself.

The book is prefaced by a longish statement announcing that ‘the narratives here are neither history nor biography, but they share characteristics of each.’ This interests me in thinking about Pollock’s motivation. Unlike John Seed, who took Mayhew’s writings on London, where he employed a firm device: every word in Seed’s book Pictures from Mayhew was drawn from Henry Mayhew’s writings on London, Seed writing ‘through’ the work; Pollock reverts to ‘telling’ his subjects’ stories with accuracy.

On first reading, Pollock appears to be adhering to biography. For example, we know that Dylan Thomas did indeed die in St Vincent’s Hospital in 1953 and that Mary Wollstonecraft attempted suicide on Putney Bridge in 1795. However, I’m most confident in using the poem “Grace Notes, 1966” to focus on this review. The poem’s subject matter is The Beatles, a band that I know a fair bit about.

The use of the ‘time signature’ of 1966 is interesting here. Pollock reverts to the earliest days of the band’s history to start the narrative: 1962 and their trips to Hamburg (all factually correct). If we take a look at the poem itself, we can get a flavour of Pollock’s writing:

Seven sharp, they begin‒fifteen takes

Of “Love Me Do”‒this time

Paul not happy with the drumming [...]

 

And from later in the poem, where we actually see some of Pollock’s creativity shine:

April 7, 1966‒a zephyr rising from cool mountains

Across scented leaves

The sea swallowing itself, a river swollen with light

Now waves, now grains, figures becoming, becoming

Becoming‒John ghostly at the boundary, loops

Sounding echo [...]

 

Here we have Pollock describing the process (or at least the acid trip) that Lennon undertook to write the song “Tomorrow Never Knows.” A quick ‘google’ confirms that the band was in the studio on that date.

The real strength of Pollock’s work is when he breaks from the biographical elements that he employs so readily, as above. Though of course there is always the mystery and intrigue associated with writers’ biographies, I wonder whether more of Pollock himself was needed in these poems. As noted, when the imagination meets the biography the poems shine. What is to be admired, especially, are the risks that Pollock takes in terms of form. There are some long poems here. For example, “Grace Notes, 1966” runs to fourteen pages. Of course, if the reader is absorbed into a poem about the subjects on offer here, there’s a real opportunity to dive into the material.

‒Andrew Taylor, for The Journal