Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Great Regulars: And that's why James Pollock's debut,

Sailing to Babylon (which had hardly left port before it was nominated for this year's Governor General's Award), is such a noteworthy book. Of the topics I advise to steer clear of, he writes about: Glenn Gould (and his Chickering piano), the Northwest Passage (twice), the Franklin Expedition and birdsong.

But in Pollock's unadorned style, forged as it is in traditional forms--blank verse, rhyming couplets, sonnets, terza rima--we get a vision of an old world, freighted with history, and still able to astonish itself with the novelty of its recurrence.

from Michael Lista: National Post: On Poetry: Sailing to Babylon, by James Pollock

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