James Pollock

Biography

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon, which was a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award in Poetry, runner-up for the Posner Poetry Book Award, 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, 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, which made The Partisan‘s list of the best books of 2015. He earned a Ph.D. in literature and creative writing from the University of Houston, and is now Professor of English and Creative Writing at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa, where he teaches poetry writing, Shakespeare, Canadian literature, and modern and contemporary American poetry. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.

Judges’ 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 — a self we come to know, in part, through the poet’s evocation of a rich company of tutelary spirits: Glenn Gould and Northrop Frye, Henry Hudson and C.P. Cavafy. Quietly confident, formally adept, assured in their music, these artful lyrics are not only an accomplishment in themselves but promise to register, as the poet says, ‘the breaking changes of a life to come’.” – Mark Doty

Summary

You will hear in these poems something like the jouncing and ruckus of a wilderness traveller adjusting the gear on his back, steeling his resolve, finding his footings and heading off. In the end, Pollock’s departures are an exploration of that inward Northwest Passage where the borderlines themselves between real and imagined, the present and the past, the found and the lost, seem almost to dissolve—passages, as Pollock says, ‘breaking up within’ — and where, in this anthem of mixed voices, our wondering where home is becomes our wandering where home is … I would almost prefer to be the reviewer, or some boastful exegete revealing to readers one hundred years from now some of the untold treasures that, its many readers notwithstanding, lie hidden here still.” — Jeffery Donaldson taken from the Foreword to Sailing to Babylon

Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.

James Pollock reads My Grandmother’s Bible

More about James Pollock

The following are links to other Web sites with information about poet James Pollock. (Note: All links to external Web sites open in a new browser window.)

• James Pollock (official web site)
• James Pollock profile (Poets & Writers)
• Interview with James Pollock (The Toronto Quarterly)

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