Blackwater Quartet

It's near impossible to summarise Blackwater Quartet. Pollock's formal ability as a writer is so assured that it's easy to forget how impressive his control is. I can't think of any recent poetry I've read with a better use of rhyme and meter than his "Prologue": it is superbly readable, with a panoramic sweep over deserts and Essex squaddie towns, 'civilisation' returning to the sands, with the irreconcilable clash between our valueless market-driven society and its ability to suffer and inflict biblical savagery. There's something humbling and admirable in the existence of this massive collection. In terms of scope and ambition, it must be amongst the most impressive poetry I've encountered recently. - Paul Sutton, for The Journal (UK) Estill Pollock's poetry is a profoundly moving journey of exploration, from the landscapes of the present and the recently remembered past, to the cataclysmic happenings of the past centuries as they have affected him and his forebears. The mood ranges from melancholy to ecstatic, and carries us along with him as he surveys those people and events which have brought him to this point. This is mid-life crisis resolved in stately iambic hexameters and subtle rhyming patterns. The resulting book is remarkable, presenting a tension between the orderly shapeliness of the poems and the chaotic content of his own life, brought to heel by the power of language. Through the elegance of his language and the slightly formal style he has chosen to write in, he becomes not the subject of the book, but the guide to a long and complicated journey, which at some time in our lives we all essay. His long narrative lines, reminiscent of Browning with echoes of that other ex-patriot American poet T. S. Eliot in his erudition and competency with form, place him firmly in the great body of English poetry. ...[This] is a fine example of the poet's craft. - B. Ellis, for Tears in the Fence (UK) A wonderful reminder of the power poetry can muster.... - T. Allen, for Terrible Work (UK)