Poetry
Véhicule Press/
Signal Editions, 2022
Trade paperback
75 pp 7.5" x 5"
ISBN13: 9781550656107
Durable Goods
"The poetic catalogue of ordinary things 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 makes 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
Poetry
Able Muse Press, 2012
80 pages
ISBN 978-0-9865338-7-7
Sailing to Babylon
"James Pollock is a poet of Northwest Passages, a learned Canadian poet with a splendid ear and a Romantic sensibility, a keen explorer of inner and outer states. Sailing to Babylon is not only a fully realized and accomplished work of art--it is also a noble book."
— Edward Hirsch
"The metaphysics of the pause, the transition, the image: James Pollock has the Tranströmer instinct, but he plays the music in his very own key. These are haunting, deeply digested, nearly always surprising poems."
— Sven Birkerts
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
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Essays
The Porcupine's Quill, 2012
224 pages
ISBN 978-0889843578
Typeset in Cartier Book. Printed on acid-free Zephyr Antique laid. Smyth sewn into sixteen page signatures with hand-tipped endleaves, front and back.
You Are Here
"You Are Here is the most compelling enquiry into the current state of poetry in this country since Northrop Frye's omnibus surveys in the 1950s. This is a book I have been waiting to read for most of my adult life."
— T. F. Rigelhof
"You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada is an elegant salvo in the ongoing guerilla war against Canada's complacent (and sometimes incompetent) poetry culture. Erudite but always accessible, Pollock is a critic who belongs to the best kind of old school: the sort whose members write clearly, can teach you a thing or two and have the nerve to have an opinion."
— Jason Guriel
Finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays
Poetry
The Porcupine's Quill, 2015
64 pages
ISBN 978-0889843851
The Essential Daryl Hine
Named one of the best books of 2015 by Partisan magazine
"It takes a great editor to shape a vision of another poet's work that is both their own and true to the author; Pollock has done that here. The Essential Daryl Hine makes it obvious that the boy from B.C. really is one of the best we have. I don't think it's too great a leap to say that in Pollock, Daryl Hine has found his ideal editor. We should all be so lucky."
— Derek Webster
"[T]he ideal way to get to know a poet who deserves to be better known."
— Brooke Clark