Sailing to Babylon

by James Pollock

"James Pollock is a poet of Northwest Passages, a learned Canadian poet with a splendid ear and a Romantic sensibility, a keen explorer of inner and outer states. Sailing to Babylon is not only a fully realized and accomplished work of art--it is also a noble book."--Edward Hirsch

​"The metaphysics of the pause, the transition, the image: James Pollock has the Tranströmer instinct, but he plays the music in his very own key. These are haunting, deeply digested, nearly always surprising poems."--Sven Birkerts

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 26, 2012

About the author

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and winner of an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association; and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (The Porcupine's Quill, 2012), a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also editor of The Essential Daryl Hine (The Porcupine's Quill), which made The Partisan's list of the best books of 2015. A new book of his poems, Durable Goods, is forthcoming from Véhicule Press/Signal Editions in 2022. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, The Walrus, and many other journals. They have won the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and have been reprinted in anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. His essays and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, Canadian Notes & Queries, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. He graduated from York University in Toronto, earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and is now Professor of English at Loras College. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.

Reviews

[James Murphy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The heart of this remarkable volume of poetry is the long poem "Quarry Park" in which the poet's son, Felix, acts as a kind of Virgil leading him through a park which seems to be both heaven and hell. Death is encountered through the interaction of ants and aphids. The spirit of Eliot's "Four Quartets" is evoked with the recurring sight and sound of a cardinal. Along the way Pollock points our history in landmarks and materials important to the Indians who originally walked the trails through the park. It's the gentle Dantesque afternoon of a father and son. It's elegant and lovely. And it's even in terza rima.

[Jeffrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Prow is Proof of Pollock’s Prowess

There’s a common misperception about poetry; namely, that it’s not grounded in reality. Poetry’s detractors complain about abstraction, and indeed, if you don’t have the literary wherewithal to process phonemes and lines of lyrics into meaningful sensation, it will never be for you. But even poetry’s most ardent backers will often agree that it’s an art not always grounded in decipherable reality. James Pollock’s Sailing to Babylon defies such definition. The slender volume, containing 17 shorter poems and one long form poem, is his first collection of poetry and, in it, one of his primary concerns seems to have been to provide his readers with the skeletal structure necessary in order to make sense of his poems. In addition to the book’s end notes which credit sources and inspirations, a number of the poems themselves contain titular annotations which give the interested reader a map in which to set out from Pollock’s own work.

Those annotations, along with a nicely written and thoughtful forward by the Canadian poet Jeffery Donaldson, make this book an easy point of departure for someone new to the art of poetry. Like any book of poetry, some of the poems in this collection work better than others. My favorite, Prow, is an imaginative adventure across an ocean of time: “gripping an oar of air, this oaken prow/once craned its latticed neck and thrust its whorled/and hook beaked orb-head like a bird of prey.” Though a mere 14 lines, by the time you’re done reading this sloshing poem aloud, you’re thankful to once again savor the placid waters of contemplative silence. Its rich vocabulary of imagery and open-mouthed sounds, which, if one is not careful, almost topple down the back of the throat, give it a tone of high seas drama, crashing waves, and impossible conditions; pure textual intensity.

Surely, then, this prow imagined as Pollock observes it is majestic in scale and form, able to lead ancient mariners across frigid expanses of gray nothingness, both talisman and testament to brute will? But pull up a Google image with the term “British Museum Prow” per the poem’s annotation and you’ll see the rather small brown wooden artifact in question. While fierce in design, its orb-like head culminating in two ghastly stingers straight from a mighty thorax, it’s hardly the object you’ve envisioned, suspended in some great room of a great museum. But reflect a little more on that small prow and you’ll come to realize its splendor lies not in its form, but in the tales it can tell; a centenarian recounting a lost time to a credulous child.

The beauty of Pollock’s best poems is indeed that you the reader become that enthralled child listening to a series of remarkable adventures. And, as any wise storyteller is wont to do, Pollock looks to his poetic forbearers for inspiration. Calling to mind Constantine Cavafy, the Egyptian born and raised Greek poet, whose Ithaka

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you are old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you would not have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

poignantly renders our connections to home, real or imagined, more tenuous, yet more full of possibility than we might imagine, the Canadian born Pollock now living in the United States, in one of two poems entitled Northwest Passage, exhorts his listeners: “When you set out to find your Northwest Passage/and cross to an empty region of the map”…

may you stumble at last upon some band of Inuit
hauling their catch of seal across the ice,

and 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.

The poems in Sailing to Babylon do not get any better than when they express this potent combination of a longing for roots and an exploration of the unknown within.

Yet, disappointingly, there’s a host of other poems that don’t come together nearly so well. The novelty in the idea underlying his poem The Museum of Death is fine, but the execution, in passages such as: “Everything is archaeological:/prayer, toilets, table manners, cash.” is clumsy. In other cases, such clumsiness gives way to the banal, such as in Map of the Interior, a poem which pays homage to the explorer David Thompson. Here the metaphors are never convincingly realized, such as the reference to two Canadian rivers which: “pour their heart’s blood out into the sea/like three titanic arteries of a body.” Finally, I would take issue with the on-again, off-again rhyme scheme in Quarry Park, the long form poem that closes out the book. The poem is pleasantly discursive when read without voice, a meandering of thought that nicely mimics the rambling nature of the poet’s walk with his son, but read in meter, is a drunk man's chore.

Thankfully, though, the good outnumber the not-as-good ones and in the end, the effect is to leave the reader desirous of more. To take stock of any poet requires a collection larger than this, but there’s enough here, in my laymans opinion, to reveal glimpses of great potential. As Donaldson eloquently notes in the forward, the book is graciously endowed with “a symbolic inventory” fitting of any mythical land. The book, with its numerous references to Canadian themes, was even a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Award, one of Canada’s most prestigious. That seems appropriate, though there are plenty of poems in this collection which speak about things much bigger than Canada. And given the fact that Canada is pretty big, it’s saying a lot for this small first volume of poetry.

© Jeffrey L. Otto

[Inderjit · Rating 5 out of 5]

In an interview with Shusha Guppy of The Paris Review, Yves Bonnefoy said, “Poet is a word one can use when speaking of others, if one admires them sufficiently.” Well, I’m happy to introduce you all to James Pollock, poet.

This year, Pollock’s collection Sailing to Babylon was on the Canadian shortlist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. Here’s part of Judge Mark Doty’s citation, “The sentence, in James Pollock’s remarkably assured debut volume, is a unit of music and of time, a carefully modulated choreography that moves the reader through an elegantly constructed set of meditations on place and history and the education of the self.”

Before I picked Sailing to Babylon I had made the resolution to read a poem a day as part of a renewed commitment to my own poetry. And I’m so thankful I chose Pollock because I can’t remember the last time I was so moved by a single collection. After each poem I had to stop and allow myself the time to marvel at Pollock’s mastery. In fact, I reread each of his poems multiple times just to make sure there wasn’t some hidden gem I had missed.

The extraordinary thing about Sailing to Babylon is Pollock’s ability to recall an action, a moment or an object with tremendous elegance. And I completely agree with Michael Lista of the National Post when he said, “we get a vision of an old world, freighted with history” because in the pages of Sailing to Babylon Pollock revisits his past and sees it with absolute understanding.

If only he could watch his teacher read

and, gazing, could learn there at his desk

in the winter light of Hillcrest Public School

and listen as she speaks the strangest words—

with her vivid face, her braided hair

and dark eyes like a real and ordinary

siren’s—if only he could wait like that

forever while Miss Harmon reads The Odyssey

(his kind young teacher with the ringing voice

he loves so much he lets the story sing

into his heart), she would peal out of him,

swaying above him like a slender bell,

the breaking changes of a life to come.

~ “The Poet at Seven”

Sailing to Babylon reminded me why I fell in love with poetry in the first place. From “My Grandmother’s Bible” to “Ex Patria” to “The Museum of Death” it’s a must read volume for newcomers and aficionados alike.

[THE TORONTO QUARTERLY · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my in-depth interview with James Pollock as we discuss the art of poetry and his debut collection Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012) which has been nominated for the Governor General's Award in Poetry 2012. Read the interview now on my TTQ Blog.
http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not my reader's review. I will come back to write one as soon as I can. Meanwhile:

Bought it on Nook and now buying it in print form so I can pass it on... and buy it again... and pass it on...
Must read poetry for 2012!