NEW HOPE INTERNATIONAL REVIEW

Over 300 pages of poetry collected from the period 1974-2004. The selection is divided into four books, with each book divided into a number of parts. This is pretty intense, powerful stuff, with many of the poems quite lengthy. LEAVE OF ABSENCE exhibits Estill Pollock's style, with detail upon detail filling in the mosaic of scene or image:

	Windows wide, the faded chintz
	flaps in upward draughts, hugs Elizabethan brick.
	An old quilt airs across the cill and pantiles, hints
	of spring as April clears late mists
	though winter chill persists until mid-morning.
	The rugs are beaten on the line, dust in bursts
	sailing over hedgerows
	where startled birds combust.

	That August, I walked along the clatter
	of cornstalks, kicking through the furrow rows
	for flints. I stopped, stooped within the tatter

	of river meadow ploughed to suit the crows,
	examining my finds: the arrow tips
	translucent — those serrated roes

	felt ripping pelt and heart wall — hand-tooled chips
	I polished, held to light recalling rites
	lost centuries.

	                     Our lives are kites
	of clouds the wind drives out along the air
	around us, template for the arrows' flights.

	For thirty years
	the two returned to summer on the lakes.
	The road from Florence was the same,
	and the villages little changed.
	Across the old town to the shore,
	views from favourite rooms remained
	true to sunny postcard photographs.

	Such memories distract.
	The glassy pond is crazed and the world
	swims through its own distortions,
	is torn and changed as landscapes change,
	climates circle, and the generations are achieved.
	We are reconciled to cold,
	to water's suppleness suspended.

	The universe dismembers a billion stars,
	still light leaks outwards first and last.
 	The sun's instructions to the leaf
	extend the shade at noon.
	This is the sound of our next breath.

	The artefact of all our futures gains
	midheaven: overhead, the comet's wedge
	instructs us in regret, a swordsweep flash
	and frenzy of lost time, of worlds that pass.

	The likeness is my father's, the argument mine.
	Flemish-bond brickwork, old buildings
	in the Federal style, May wine and madrigals:
	the causes we die for return
	with the personal effects, preserved in photographs,
	discovered in hometowns row upon row,
	sweeter than rivers or marjoram needles,
	as impartial as sunlight on date palm and laurel.

	There are stars to wish upon,
	and stars to keep our love songs honest,
	but when the stars in the window pane have gone
	and these wilderness endeavours fade,
	will nothing else remain
	as rule or symbol of the world we made?

	We walked in chill October.
	The girls were little still, peering down
	through pier decking,
	watching waves sling dirty spray.

	A degree of uncertainty
	separates the present from the past.
	The dead appear in my mirror.
	More and more they insist on answers.

	Our lives go by to nowhere,
	quick as hawk stoop
	or a shunted current earthed

	The life we lived is past. Each spasm treat
	and bagged-quail flutter focuses the mind
	on whatever else remains.

Even if at times the poetry in this collection is just a little too over-egged into linguistic complexity, and the selection itself could have been pared down somewhat, with some rather rambling stuff reserved for the end of the book which seems to me a poetic breakdown of his style and form into the minutiae of his mind's obsessions, this is certainly deep and powerful work, not to be missed.

Another collection from Pollock reinforces past review evidence of the power of his poetry, still coming after the marathon BLACKWATER QUARTET two years earlier. Of more modest length, this collection is sectioned into I. STUDIES IN CAESURA, II. AN ALMANAC OF DEEPER DREAMS, III. RESURRECTION SUITE.

Pollock is no fun read, lack of humour touched with pessimism pervades, which perhaps adds to line strength and the message that he is not playing around. Indeed, the messages of some of his subjects are vitally serious to future generations. The first section starts grimly with A FORWARD POSITION:

	A man whose children were dead,said
	this country's a puppet with cut strings

	... the scald-pot seas
	red as a cut heart, that day ... a shadow
	spooling fathoms, surfacing through iron spears,
	its white flukes trimmed to sounding cold
	for Ahab: his last breath

	Blood washes the world.
	The poem that told it slips from the harp
	and scurries, rat-like through rotten straw.

	In the hall, in high rafters, a pet hawk, stirring,
	keens its yellow eye.

The biographical nature of AN ALMANAC OF DEEPEST DREAMS allows some poems to cluster and reinforce the section better. The note is lighter, the technical skill much in evidence, perhaps more telling when the cut-off to death is in memory. From A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY:

	Seasons are lent, a month in mind restored
	in a dynamic of memory.
	The trellis of roses
	sheltered the view to the cemetery lane.
	Climbing through another summer,
	those bright reds were Mother's favourites, their scent fresh
	still, as here, circling and circling, this hallmark
	binding flesh.

	A gamma burst whitens flowers,
	a mystery brightness surrounding
	bitter colours
	in quiet lanes.

	The gag of fruit
	ripens too early,plump poisons.
	One taste
	to send us to the wards.