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 19th
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
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