Reviews

"The poetic catalogue of ordinary things that James Pollock creates in Durable Goods is wry and bracingly dark. The poet's cool eye on the everyday makes the familiar strange, as objects seem to conspire to educate us in a dire metaphysic. An oscillating fan is "a time-lapse sunflower in a cage"; a dishwasher is a "crazed assault/on indifferent death itself." But there's pleasure, even joy here as well: the genuine delight of naming precisely, of making an elegant architecture of meaning out of the stubborn, contrary things that surround us." — Mark Doty

"James Pollock's latest collection, Durable Goods, presents a speaker able to mine seemingly insignificant objects for the astonishing. These elegant but intimate poems echo the very best of Tony Harrison and James Merrill—works which, beneath the sparkle of their cheeky humour, exhale with vulnerability and generosity and edge towards the oracular." — Alexandra Oliver

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon (2012), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Award in Poetry. His prizes include the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. His other books include You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (2012) and The Essential Daryl Hine (2015). He grew up in southern Ontario, Canada, and is now Professor of English at Loras College. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.