Relic Environments Trilogy by Estill Pollock

Relic Environments Trilogy

Constructing the Human was published by Poetry Salzburg in 2001 and Pollock continued to develop a range of poems, including versions of poems from Rilke and Brecht, together with versions of Anglo-Saxon writings and poems of 10th century China. Between 2000 and 2004, he completed a further three volumes, and in 2005, a major edition was published that incorporating the previous four titles, together with the Prologue, “Decorative Initials for a Book of Hours”, in single volume, Blackwater Quartet.

His most recent collections, Relic Environments, Available Light and Designs for Living were published by Cinnamon Press. Relic Environments Trilogy brings together these three collections, including sections of translation and interpretation of poetry from a survivor of Chernobyl, 10th century Chinese poetry and a long sequence inspired by folk tales.

The definition of a relic environment is as diverse as any poem here; it is the table under bamboo eaves, or the reactor’s blasted shell, or the Mandelbrot set of an elaborate tattoo. It is the forest path. It is both momentum and stillness. It is this sentence, closing now forever to present time – for you, the reader, forever, a time recalled.

Estill Pollock was born in rural Kentucky in 1950. While at university, his work appeared in the Atlantic Monthly’s national selection of prize-winning poems over a three-year period. In the early 70s, he published in Alkahest (Wesleyan University Press) and the Harvard Advocate. His first major poetical works were published in Poetry in Chicago, receiving the George Dillon Memorial Prize. In 1973 he left Kentucky to worked as an itinerant tradesman in Virginia and Florida, before settling in England, near the Essex coast.

Visit Estill’s website here