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Estill Pollock was born in Kentucky, and has lived in England for more than forty years. A pamphlet, Metaphysical Graffiti, was published in England by Highcliff Press in the 1990s, followed by Constructing the Human, a major collection from Poetry Salzburg in 2001. Between 2005-2011 the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy was published by Cinnamon Press (Wales). A collaboration with Broadstone Books in Kentucky provided the impetus for his recent poetry collections, Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark and Heathen Anthems, with a further collection, Parse Poetica, planned for 2025. The e-chapbooks And Then and Working Title are published by Mudlark.
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Author Statement
Like the journeyman, poets carry their skills with them. In the hand and eye the memory of the wood’s grain persists, in pargeted plaster or cedar shakes set neatly to the roof’s pitch, in syllables and the line’s beat, everything within reach.
Practical and at ease with itself, the poem requires no audience. With it, you can plane a door or splice a rigging shroud. It fasts for a thousand years; it devours galaxies. It digs a grave for itself and buries its shadow. It is here and not here. It is nothing, yet Its weight anchors the world.
The sequence here is an existential watermark, like the spaces left by leaves on winter boughs—leaves now blown along ghost trails, at crossroads here signposted as Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems and Parse Poetica.
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Estill Pollock: Eight Poems
BYRON, BEFORE CHILDE HAROLD
The cantos eclipsed the limping gait, the debt
and gonorrhoea, but that was later, before
he was god among the Greeks a time
of rough trade and regret.
His mother’s DNA informed the pudding cheeks,
the second-rate inheritance of rented rooms
and years counted down to
birthright and a threadbare title.
That colder climate stoked the rhymes,
the Masters wary of jumpstart metres, hexameters
at Harrow undermined by claret
and choir boys on the ottoman.
His first, thin volume a pastiche
of brat poems and Classicist homage, his letters
refer only to the good reviews; anything less
was quarrelsome.
Moneylenders quibbled terms, attentive to
his fault-line bonhomie. Still, a quiet breath
could soothe white noise, the mind’s rasp:
I am, he wrote, a mighty scribbler.
From Athens later, the first of Pilgrimage
post-haste to London, then praise: Nothing
you have done before is equal…. He shrugged,
My mind required a crag to break upon.
In Rome, he watched three robbers die,
the Black Christ carried before them, the banners,
the soldiery, the scaffold and guillotine, the heads
lifted to the crowd.
He said that with the first his face grew hot
and sickness swelled, but by the others
he was unfazed, reflecting, icons raised
so too may fall.
A later portrait caught the gaze intaglio, the cut
of cloud and catchlights reckoning a farther shore.
Shadows haze the edge, against a look
blade-bright, fugitive.
GONERS
I slept my childhood in this bed, the headboard nicked
from roughhouse games and where
my prized Swiss Army knife jagged initials
deep as days.
One bedpost cap, carved acorn-shaped,
lifted with a twist, and there the gap
for folded passwords to each treehouse, cave
or fort my mob of pals laid claim to:
Goldie, and Tom, and the boy we called Maggot,
Tom the Lesser and Kathy’s Carl
also known as Elvis, all, now
gone to ground.
The bed springs twist and roll. Under my weight
they sing like hedgerow wrens, but no notes
now in hidden nooks, nothing
of permissions, promises or deeds.
On Saturday TV the Indians died, and none
had speaking parts, just cipher momentum
fading from mind, the way the extras fake
a fall, or take a bullet in the heart.
Goldie got a new Dad, who called him
Goldilocks and told him not to tell. Tom’s sister gave
her soft divide a secret name
and whispered it to me.
Bulldozers rake the street, the old haunts cleared,
this heap of salvage a rusted dream
of nicknames and codes, of trickster light
and eagle feathers in the dust.
The late hour rides a failing seam, dusk dismembering
night from day, and sleep would recognise
me here, this shadow place that swallows light
and will not blink.
from Entropy
EMILY DICKINSON IN PARADISE, 1886
In my ragtag way, pleased with myself, finding
My fortune in my friends, my poems
Like shoeless children waiting at their doors
I am come to what I am, here, another
Amherst—the trees, white clapboard houses
Illusion I know, but my own
My poor sister, scrummaging my letters
After I left the room, so many
And she so ill-prepared—she had thought
An afternoon to mend my embarrassments
With grate and poker, only to find my cupboard
Wheezing with the weight of them
My friends keep my letters, too, my bobbin spool
Of brightly mingled threads
That make a life, the life they knew
As mine, as in my loving them I shared
Some secret self, purring sweetly
By the table, spoiled for little treats
The light here, a dapple of mimic shadows
My own shadow a cut-paper enterprise
Of folds and trinket pockets, sometimes tucked
About my heels, other times, loose—bolting
Like a spaniel through hedge
And barley row—I can but ask, What is real
My poems—close work, and slyly so, like bows
Looped round a prickly nettle, reserved
Between us, thus, the imponderable divide
Philosophers make much of, and there is a truth
In it, that shapes sobriety neat as pastry crimps
And demonstrates the means of quiet faith
My soul grown shrewd as Yankee gold
Unstitches shroudy dreams—someone I think
Should write this down, no fuss of copperplate
But an easy hand, on the hallway table the envelope
A recognition of delight beyond
The telltale twitch, the tickle cough that summons
from Time Signatures
AND THEN
It had to come to this, arranging flowers
Japanese cult style to the exacting
Nomenclature of goodbye, though as yet
No exit sign appears above the door—Archangels
And the eternal et cetera
The lines around my eyes, like the crumpled spine
Of an old autograph book, the look
As sad as a broken clock, confirm rare-metal elegies
Wheezing to a close
All else, a matter of husbandry—embryos edited
To a teardrop datum worth its salt, between the quick
And the dead our privacy rebranded
By crypto hack bots in digital vaults
Satellites hang nosey
For the news, the world a door
Without a lock—fascists surfing echo chamber rallies, a snip
Of Python code undermining Eden
This is about everything, and nothing
I clap my hands below the bright tree, breaking
The sparrow’s dream
AIRLOCK
St. John’s Church, built on the lines
Of a footstool Queen Anne booted
In a rage, though who can say—the dead
Notoriously schtum
Lord Treasurers with the clap
And broken noses, Popes
With matchlocks, a society speaking to itself
Through poetry—well, maybe not
Mozart schmoozing Salzburg beau monde
For trade—the glitterati there
Preferring French couture to Preludes
By upstarts in a fleabag wig
Stone Age people throwing
Sticks at stars—Space-sim habitats
In the garden shed, a software virus
Jacking driverless cars
Wagner mercenaries, murder apps, all
That trouble with Heaven and Hell, dark
Matter, aliens on dissection slabs
At Roswell
What to say about subversive tropes—poems
Are freaks that pray only
For themselves, like choke-hold sex, in back rooms
Rented by the week
from Ark
THE AGENT
In a bookshop under rotting eaves
I found the grail edition, pirated
out of Brussels as was the way in 1863—
a troop of neat, sumo volumes: d’Artagnan
the bane of Jesuits, the death of Porthos,
all, Dumas in a travesty translation,
but rare.
Characters are redeemed, where departure
salvages honour from disgrace, as Damien Hirst
morphs pathology into Art.
The light falling across the pages
is abstract, the way frost glistening
on holly leaves reminds us of the snowy hills
beyond the window, or as on pages here,
siege guns firing on the Dutch frontier
through winter fog.
My buyer is romantic; her penchant
for George Meredith, fair women
with fair names, neither here
nor there—I have accounts to settle,
and this week her preference is French.
It is thought, no good book without morality,
but there is nothing on my laptop
about virtue, nothing of the drawing-room
or natural civility.
Horace, Burns, Hazlitt, second tier
but worth a look: the day is what it is, and will not
be dissuaded from its prize—a Molière
in calfskin, or illustrations by Beardsley
at a hotel in Nice.
The heart
taken by storm is only ink and paper,
and names its price.
from Heathen Anthems
ROGUE
This book’s bibliography, a sump
Of spent attrition, old scores settled
In snit reviews of theories pet or suspect
The letter in the archives, confirming patents
To clone genitive riffs in Petrarchan rhyme schemes
Mine alone
The photograph of Lenin at the Finland Station
The diamond, set into the rapper’s eye tooth
Machines with your voice
Your face, your ballot papers—energy infrastructure
Slave to rogue States
What you were doing when you heard the news
When you knew everything had changed
SAVANT
Whisper your name to me, not
Your pulp fiction nom de plume, but the one
Made of lichen distilled
Through smartphone microwaves
And near-death experiences
Whisper your name to me, whisper
Vowels like old beeches, a biochemical
Root matrix signalling danger
To saplings beyond chainsaws or borers
Or stump fires in the clearing
Whisper your name, its ratio tick
Of sun-and-planet gears, its consonants
Of leaf-sail photosynthesis, silvery
Seed pods and fungal lace, of nettle tea
And ‘57 Chevy grille chrome
Whisper your name to me, its biome
Of intent and reconciliation, gifted
In cicada husks and rice paper
Folded into flying shapes, the crucifix
Of circuitry your name ignites
from Parse Poetica
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The High Window 