Designs for Living Reviews

Designs for Living

Cinnamon Press 2008

Estill Pollock is a mature poet, secure in his abilities, assured enough to play the long game (witness this volume concludes the Relic Environments Trilogy), and like an angler with a lure he spins ideas through sequences of poems, confident his readers will follow.

The opening poem, "Face", explores identity, wearing the faces of the dead, of others - 'these others as we, dreamers in their comas'. It concludes 'The man you were, the face in the mirror: there you are. // Here I am.'

These others whose lives and memory affect our identity, who we wear on our faces, are at the heart of this collection. They are 'the past, its ghosts/devolved to son and daughter, these/others of the blood.' In "A Space in Time", these others inhabit a dream, '...faint energies/ (some I saw right through)/ to share a space in time, its senses recollected.'

Pollock is precise with his descriptive images. In "Everything Else", when lovers walk through rain, it's not romantic rain. It's hard: 'the rain is nails/a rusty thunderhead of cut-wire sharps unloading'; they reach a cliff that 'old continents scrummed vertical.'

There is a move away from personal histories in "Ex Cathedra". A river 'with no memory of itself' flows past a cathedral with reliquary and holy manuscripts, 'the preserve of white-gloved keepers.' in its library, 'The saved dead/thread the margins, anchored in the inks'.

Memories preserved in ink are also the subject of "Japanese Tattoos in the Edo Period", where we find 'characters/for Stay,Remain.// I am everything you made me.'

"The Journeyman's Tale" has an epigraph from Chaucer, and Victorian style intros to four Bukowski-ish vignettes. [In] 'Part the Fourth, wherein Heavenly Music is Heard, and a Wise Woman Reveals the Resting Place of Heroes', the construction worker is shown a bed: '...Andrew Jackson slept in that bed/No fuckin way I said/Yep she says, big as life and ugly with it/She says it come down to her through her great-granny/And was worth a little somethin'. Here again, the passing on of memories to others.

The book is carefully constructed - poems interacting to produce a sum greater than its parts. However, near the centre are four poems that feel awkward: "Tribe", "Field Notes", "Tribe (reprise)", and "Revolution". Each has political overtones, and while these are fine poems in their own way they seemed out of step with the rest of the collection.

The second half of the book is a sequence entitled "Animus" (a feeling of enmity, or the Jungian term for the masculine principle residing in the female psyche - perhaps both - the poems exhibit traits of each - three long poems retelling five Grimm fairy tales in an adult way. These are the highlight of the collection for me, exhibiting evocative storytelling and deft use of language.

"Tales of Wood and Iron" (The Three Feathers, Rapunzel) begins, 'Night and day, for all God's children, the same star/dawn to dreaming, a little breath between/light's constancy/and the cold dark'. In the second half of this [section], 'far from festivals or trade', kidnapped Rapunzel grows '...and the girl's hips/widened womanly' until one day the witch 'caught the man-scent,/buckskin sweat and the spilled seed'. True to all good fairy tales, Rapunzel is rescued by her prince, but each night in her dreams '...she stood, anchored in oak shade/deeper than the world's dark heart, older/than the cold, blind blink of heaven' - an obsidian reflection of the poem's opening lines.

In "The Child-Eaters" (Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel), a pubescent girl climbs into bed with the Man/Wolf 'and pulling the knife/still further, filleted the howl/hissing for air in Wolf's throat'. In a famine struck land 'bellies bloated, guts pinched and heaved with hunger'. We have Gretel pushing the witch into an oven, for a moment 'considering her next square meal...' cannabalisitc overtones that reappear as the poem ends, ominously reiterating 'It was a time of famine.'

In "A Mask of Mirrors" (Snow White), the step-mother Queen is abetted in her murderous plans by a servant she could trust 'not to ...go squeamish when fine talk turned to sweaty jelly'. Snow White exacts revenge: 'ordered iron shoes, stoked and stoked red as a witch's eye'.

'...there was always Death and Judgment' Pollock reminds us in the book's final poem, "Afterward: into the Forest", where we find storytelling, oral history, time, memory, the 'others' that are the preoccupation of this collection, who draw the blueprints we live our lives by, perhaps designs for living, a plan, a map for the path ahead. 'Everything rememberd/Into the forest, the path we took to meet ourselves// These others'.

At 80 pages, this is a dense 'slim volume', with multi-layered intelligent poems that bear more than one reading. It is a book whose paths I shall revisit and I recommend it to you.

...

Estill Pollock was born in 1950 in Clark County, Kentucky. After a time of living and travelling in the American South as an itinerant tradesman, he found his way to England - Essex, to be exact, where he has lived as a British subject for over twenty years. His collection, Fields and Standing Waves was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2004.

In Designs for Living, he concludes the Relic Environments trilogy that began with Relic Environments, followed by Available Light (both Cinnamon Press), and continues to explore personal and collective notions of time, space, and memory. Time and various ways of measuring his own and a collective past, preoccupy this poet through music, in old ships, in the crumbling of former habitats, meditations on war, the poetry of loss (of his mother, of past loves), the poetry of place. His work is firmly located in the pastoral tradition, one might even say supremely engaged with it, in what Paul Celan termed the 'creaturely path', entering fields, farmlands and the forests of fairytales rewritten, familiar, but also skewed to dislocation, rendered as they are to the brutality of the original medieval stories.

His poetry is elusive and allusive. Initially, this isn't an easy read. You get the impression that you are in the presence of a very robust intellect that just isn't messing around. Detail piles upon detail in an accumulation of imagery that can feel a little over-egged in its linguistic complexity. Often, the poems contain philosophical asides that might prove obscure for the lay reader, and humour is conspicuous by how little it makes an appearance. But this is only at first reading. The payback for the reader comes with the second and third reading, where the poetry really starts to release its gems. Pollock has a masterly way with narrative, a very sensual style and a pin-point, lucid sharpness with language that gives the reader the scalp-shifting joy on repeated readings. The poet has to be commended for being unafraid to write in such a challenging way.

The collection is divided into two main sections - "The Lord of Time, His Curiosity and Galliard" and "Animus", the latter the Jungian term for the masculine principle residing in the female psyche. The former investigates the poet's own past in poems such as... "A Face" - 'The man you were, the face in the mirror: there you are' and in "Torch", which reads like a poem about the one who got away, in which he references Duke Ellington -'mood-lingo'- in a sly reference to his own recent poetic past in "Preludes for Prepared Piano" (Blackwater Quartet 2005 - ed.). One of the more striking poems is "A Journeyman's Tale", which takes its lead from a passage in the General Prologue of The Canturbury Tales, exhorting the reporter of a tale to repeat it as truthfully as he can. "The Journeyman's Tale" is the one narrative poem in this section and stands out because it is told in the first person with an American diction, and brings levity... to what is a very somber collection.

"Animus" is almost all narrative. The poet himself has said that he believed 'that the Long Poem might provide a more symaphetic forum to my often meandering style.' Perhaps that is true, but Pollock is no slouch with the lyric poem. At first glance, the fairytales seem rewritten simply to turn up the volume on the dark orgins. However, there is more going on than meets the eye... Red Riding Hood, and Hansel and Gretel, in "The Child-Eaters" (section), are allegories exploring themes of famine, cannibalism, and the dangers of the primeval forest.

Helpfully, the poet has book-ended the two sections with a preamble and a kind of epilogue. These prepare the reader for what is to come and to summarise what has gone. It's worth quoting the words here. From the preamble, 'on the Turing machine':

It can be imagined as something like a typewriter, but having the additional quality of being able to read, or scan, other symbols, and to erase if necessary... a tape of infinite length, divided into squares, with each square carrying a symbol. The machine would then move the tape one square at a time, read the symbol, and either remain in the same state, or move to a new state, depending on what it read. Essentially, it is a device for transforming one string of symbols into another, according to a predetermined set of rules.

And from the epilogue, "Afterward: Into the Forest":

What is spoken was in the mind

Before the stories had names

We saved our pity for ourselves

These landscapes. rivers, creatures, everything recognised

Everything remembered

Into the forest, the path we took to meet ourselves

These others

In other words, this is the join between fantasy and reality, the tie that binds the two sections... these stories of a personal past, a distant past, of ancestry and humanity... before they were ever uttered or written down.

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