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Oasis # 103

A literary magazine with a longstanding bias in favour of the British poetry scene's small experimental fringe - unlike many such publications, Oasis at least does its thing intelligently. Take, for example, the eight poems by Estill Pollock. In places, Pollock's work is perhaps a little obscure, but unlike much experimental poetry, nowhere does it descend into the realm of complete gobbledegook, and "Names in Birth Order" [from Tsunami Muses - ed.] is a fine poem indeed.

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Oasis Broadsheet #3

I found Estill Pollock’s two translations from Rilke enthralling but I must qualify that by saying that I am no Rilke expert, and I have no idea how closely these versions of two of Rilke’s most famous works resemble the originals. All I know is that they compare very favourably with some other translations I have encountered of the same poems. The second verse of ‘Orpheus. Eurydice. Hermes.’ is already a favourite of mine, however prosaic the translation: this is Pollock’s adaptation.

Beyond the rocks a mist without memory

or ambition, a forest lost for form and there,

spanned by ribbon bridges the lake’s blank face

and depth of pitiless, grey immutability.

Through a sufferance of grassland the pale path rose,

just the width of one direction, thin as the thread

unravelling from her shroud.

The translations of five Sonnets to Orpheus have tempted me back to Rilke again after some time away from him: “The earth we remembered, its weather sly / with beginnings, crawls / out to meet the rain.” A wonderful reminder of the power poetry can muster.

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Rilke's masterpieces continue to fascinate, and these lyrical reflections show the narrative to be as compelling as ever; the song endures. "Now she was the rain, water's braids unbound./ Now she was harvested, now she could answer/ as a sustenance,// a being rooted in being..." If you read it in your garden the trees will dance, apparently.

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Fields and Standing Waves

Flarestack 2004

POETRY BOOK SOCIETY Pamphlet Choice, 2004

If the overriding task of poetry is the ability of a poem to shift slightly on every reading, the beauty of rhythm, the authority and weight given to language, and the way words slide off the tongue, then Fields and Standing Waves by Estill Pollock... definately stands out as having achieved all this. It is quality writing. Every word deliberate yet delicately placed. [His] work is... pastoral, entering fileds, farmlands, and forest, using the natural landscape to illustrate social/political issues. Here is a collection powerful enough to be read time and time again.

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Fields and Standing Waves is a hefty collection. It was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice for Winter 2004. Pollock, an American poet, living in England, has brought together ten long poems, contemplative sequences couched in pastoral lyrics. The poems move across imagistic landscapes with cinematic sweeps:

in a ditchwater sky the sun a hawkshape

faint above the cedars.

("Rules of Engagement")

We can find in this collection meditations on war, fairytales rewritten, the poetry of loss, the poetry of place, rich narratives that blend with dense imagery and a lilting cadence.

The longer narrative poems might benefit from compression. You can hear the early Larkin at times, when the philosophizing takes over, but it lacks Larkin's brevity. As you'd expect, within these longer passages you can find gem-like phrases. But the longer poems that make up the bulk of the volume read, at times, like rich prose cut up. The more successful of the longer poems are divided into self-contained units, such as "Local Spirits", a sequence of fourteen sonnets that begin in East Anglian farmlands and has a range of references that includes the Bible, Elvis Presley, and travels as far as Peru. The wealth of reference in "Seconds of Arc" includes movie and literary history and stretches from Oxford to the Orient.

Too much of the collection smacks of the nineteenth century. I thought of Elizabeth Barret Browning when reading "Inventions in the Pastoral". It was only the references to TV and Microsoft that reminded me that these poems were published in the twenty-first century.

For all the breadth of these poems, the ones that really work are the shorter ones, such as "Remote". And all this suggests that Pollock needs a good editor, an Ezra Pound (whom Pollock mentions) who would take a blue crayon and strike out the messy padding and leave us with the lyric moments and the imagistic beauty that makes this collection worth going back to.

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"Pollock, Ellington, and Shakespeare"

In "Preludes for Prepared Piano", Estill Pollock takes as his inspiration Duke Ellington's album of 1957, "Such Sweet Thunder". Ellington's compositions in turn are his tribute to Shakespeare's works as he experienced them at the Stratford, Ontario Shakespeare Festival. Each of Ellington's pieces is a musical rendition of some Shakspearean conflict, scene, mood, or personality.

Pollock's section titles are drawn from the titles of Ellington's compositions. The first title, "Such Sweet Thunder", is quoted from "Midsummer Night's Dream", Act IV, Scene 1. Here's the relevant passage, starting at line 107:

Theseus: Go, one of you, find out the forester,

For now our observation is perform'd,

And since we have the vaward of the day,

My love shall hear the music of my hounds.

Uncouple in the western valley, let them go.

Despatch, I say, and find the forester.

(Exit an attendant)

We will, fair queen, up to the mountain top

And mark the musical confusion

Of hounds and echo in conjunction.

Hioppolyta: I was with Hercules and Cadmus once,

When in a wood of Crete they bay'd the bear

With hounds of Sparta. Never did I hear

Such gallant chiding; for, besides the groves,

The skies, the fountains, every region near

Seem'd all one mutual cry. I never heard

So musical a discord, such sweet thunder.

In a sense, this passage describes an aesthetic: not the music of delicate harmonies, of balance and resolution, but the music of discord, of incongruence. The messy, unresolved music of discord could describe some forms of American jazz, but it could also describe the movement of "Preludes for Prerpared Piano".

Sylistically, Pollock's poem has a lot of surface roughness - it's untidy, incongruous, unfinished, in an American, Walt-Whitman sort of way. It's elusive and allusive, and shows Pollock's usual flair for suggestive, even humorous phrasing. The poem is, as Ellington's album is, a montage: Pollock plays off scenes from Shakespeare's plays, draws from the personal and theatrical experience, works in a bit of jazz, combines the archaic and the techno-modern, and is playful all around.

Pollock's poem repays study. For example, in the first section, Pollock takes his cue from the hunting dogs of "Midsummer Night's Dream" and runs with them (so to speak), quoting 'one mutual cry' to describe the hounds' whining, squealing, and yipping in the woods. Then the poet sees the dogs in the night sky, the greyhounds of Boötes. The last two adjectives in the section are a good example of Pollock's inconguence: the primitive combined with the techno-modern, 'feral', and 'hi fi'.

Pollock is capable of writing tight traditional sonnets. However, in "Sonnet for Caesar" and "Sonnet for Hank Cinq" (drawn from "Julius Caesar" and "Henry V", respectively), he follows Ellington's lead in treating the sonnet in the archaic sense of 'sonnetto' - little song - a synonym of the modern Italian 'canzonetta'. And, like Ellington's pieces, Pollock's lines are long and slow, keeping to their own pace.

In "Lady Mac", Ellington describes his tribute to Lady Macbeth as a 'ragtime in her soul'. Pollock begins his mélange with the language of jazz, shifts to wry commentary on the play, and brings Macbeth into a present of sexual and psychological complications.

In "Sonnet in Search of a Moor", Pollock continues the complications of the previous section. He starts with the play itself, but soon shifts to "Paradise in Harlem", a 1939 crime film out of the Harlem Renaissance, combining gangsters, jazz and blues, and a passion for "Othello".

"The Telecasters" are the three 'weird sisters' who telecast Macbeth's future. In this section and the following, the ever-relevant tensions and violations of time and place are re-enacted through various forms of art - theatre, poetry, and of course, music. In "Up and Down, Up and Down (I Will Lead Them Up and Down)" - taken from Puck's maneuvers in "Midsummer Night's Dream", Act III, Scene 2, - Pollock invokes the language of the comedy with 'here comes my messenger' and 'foolish mortals', and reminds us of its idyllic play, good humor, and movement.

"Sonnet for Sister Kate" alludes to Katherina in "Taming of the Shrew". In this section, as well as in "Star-Crossed Lovers" and "Half the Fun" (the latter referring to Cleopatra's separation from Antony), Pollock takes up the ambivalences of love and desire, of distanced relationships and 'the listening position'.

Each section starts a new movement, a prelude, in which we hear multiple themes in 'mutual cry'. Yet, as Pollock says in "Madness in Great Ones", his riff on Hamlet, there is also a 'wordless presence' in this poem.

In his final section, "Circle of Fourths" (referring to Shakespeare's great contributions to tragedy, comedy, historical drama, and the sonnet [and the musical notations in jazz - ed.] , Pollock takes us beyond the 'sacred boundaries' where everything 'is outlined in black', where 'the rest is silence'. As long as the music lasts - 'droney, model counterpoint' - we listen to 'the simultaneous telling of stories', tunes that paradoxically place us in the confusions and separations of our world, even as they suggest transcendences of time and place.

What Estill Pollock says about music could equally apply to his own preludes: 'The work is an inspiration for the shape of the mouth'. Like Puck's magic, Pollock charms us with his music, and wakes us to mortal time.

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Tremblestone 4

I quite enjoyed Estill Pollock's "In Isika" [from Adventures in the Gothic - ed.] which is an evocation of a time and place - 'Not always geographical, any place,/every place, perhaps I'm there right now.' - mixing historical reconstruction with rich ritual celebration. There are moments of intensity which are powerfully material in the sense that the feelings evoked are preceded by vivid descriptions of people and places. At the same time there's a strangeness to the whole piece, almost a displacement which removes the reader from the cameos described. I'm beginning to speculate that the effect of the internet and cyberspace might be having a profound effect on our notions of time and space, and therefore our sense of 'reality'.

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10th Muse

And by reading [the poetry] you have just become a part of the process. It spreads from the centre to the periphery.

Estll Pollock's "The Child-Eaters" reworks the stories of Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel, exploring the themes of famine, cannibalism, and the dangers of primeval forest. Pollock's uncompromising and sensual style both renews these tales and takes them back to the brutal medieval world from which they came. The path he follows criss-crosses that explored by Angela Carter in The Bloody Chamber. Where Carter amplified latent archetypes, Pollock focuses on acts of ingestion in which 'it was a time of famine' is an excuse rather than a justification. The wolf that eats the grandmother has just gorged itself on her goats. The witch that plans to to eat Hansel and Gretel lives in a house made of food. In his poem, the primeval forest might be a metaphor for modern institutions, such as a children's home or an asylum or a prison. In Pollock's telling of these tales, nothing is transformed. The jewels found in the dead wirch's cottage are not symbols of a spiritual or psychological wealth gained through experience. They merely represent money:

They took the jewels

and shared them out, and things were better for a while,

but jewels are not bread, when there is no bread, nor grain to mill,

when there is no grain, even with only three mouths to feed.

It was a time of famine.

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