Pollock’s first collection offers profound delight. His lyrical style, fused with archetypes and historical allusion, takes readers on a sensual exploration of the limits of human existence in controlled, melancholy, and sometimes, ironic measure.
Many of these poems (first published in prominent journals) speak beyond the poet’s experience. I love “Radio” where we see “father at the kitchen table, radio / turned down low, alone, listening to baseball … hold[ing] the radio in both hands … to catch the wavering channel, fighting static” (p. 7, lines 2 -3, 7 & 9). The poem takes me back to my own transistor days of religiously following baseball, fighting static.
“My Grandmother’s Bible” reads like a museum piece. Closely described (“soft-worn pebbled grain … Two rips / yawn along the spine two inches long … pages … well-thumbed red … torn and weathered leather” (p. 9, lines 2-4 & 6 & 12), Pollock takes us beyond description. As skilled poets are able to accomplish, Pollock’s description, without overtly interpreting or needlessly explaining, moves us to contemplation. This poem ends with the insightful lines: “Its English / plunges into my heart like a small black bird” (13-14). Such lines are common in Sailing to Babylon, lines that invoke a sense of mystery despite their apparent facility. Such mystery, of course, is a perfect companion to the whole existential journey suggested in this collection, and perhaps refused in this particular poem.
In the title poem, “Sailing to Babylon,” in a smoothly controlled variation of the French form rondeau, Pollock takes us back to a universal (albeit unfulfilled) quest. Ironically, the implied failure becomes the measure of success redefined in the contemplation of human experience. We are the result of what we do not accomplish. The opening lines set the tone: “I sailed a boat to Babylon / and rowed back lonely in the rain” (p. 17, lines 1-2). In the insightful Foreword of this collection, Jeffery Donaldson writes: “With its quiet double-take, the title of the book recalls us not only to the biblical conditions of Babylonian exile, of a people displace from its own roots, but to W.B. Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ and its own inveterate searches. Yeats’s Byzantium is in more ways than one an imaginary place, whose reality and expression are largely the mappings-out themselves of artistic endeavor. The domain of art – with its would-be monuments of unaging intellect – is where ‘old men’ would be most at home…most not in exile from where they belong…. [Pollock] goes further…with an eye to ironizing our own ironic axioms… ‘The danger of being indifferently not at home,’ Pollock advises, ‘is the danger of being exiled from the meaning of exploration’” (x-xi).
The journey archetype situates this book. In the opening poem, “Northwest Passage” Pollock speaks of “set[ting] out to find your Northwest Passage / and to cross to an empty region of the map / with a headlong desire to know what lies beyond … [only to] see how foolish you have been: / forcing your way by will across a land / that can’t be forced, but must be understood, / toward a passage just now breaking up within” (p. 3, lines 1-3 & p. 4, lines 18 -20). Though some journeys end in foolishness, others in tragedy, or some mix of both, Pollock’s award-winning first book is a call to venture to the heart of being, to contemplate the exigency of failing to explore.
Reviewed by Ken Hada, Ada, Oklahoma
Sailing to Babylon: Poems by James Pollock. Foreword by Jeffery Donaldson. San Jose, CA: Able Muse Press, 2012. 61pp. paper. ISBN: 9780986533877.