Sailing to Babylon

by James Pollock

Overview

Poetry. SAILING TO BABYLON is the first full-length collection from James Pollock. These are poems of exploration and discovery of the self and the universal. Closer to home, there is the schoolboy fascination with the English teacher; the grandmother's old Bible; a Dantean-style extended account of a hiking adventure with a young son, fully realized in terza rima. Further out in time and geography, Pollock muses on figures from Canadian history—explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin; pioneering literary theorist Northrop Frye; and pianist Glenn Gould. Each of these quests has accompanying trials or triumphs. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, with a treasure-chest mapped for discovery in "an image of the world / made small enough to hold inside the mind." A book that has the power to take you "to the place / exactly where you always meant to go."

"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

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780986533877
Publisher:	Able Muse Press
Publication date:	06/26/2012
Sales rank:	141,982

About the Author

James Pollock grew up in southern Ontario, Canada. He graduated summa cum laude with an Honors B.A. in English literature and creative writing from York University in Toronto, and earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston, where he held several fellowships in poetry. He was a John Woods Scholar in poetry at the Prague Summer Program at Charles University in Prague, and a work-study scholar in poetry at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. His poems have been published in AGNI, The Paris Review, Poetry Daily, and more than a dozen other journals. His critical reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, Books in Canada, The New Quarterly, and elsewhere, and a collection of his criticism, You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada, is forthcoming from The Porcupine's Quill. He is an Associate Professor at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches poetry in the creative writing program. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.