Sailing to Babylon

Sailing to Babylon, James Pollock's debut collection, is filled with poems of exploration and discovery: a schoolboy's fascination with his teacher; a Bible inherited from a grandmother; an extended Dantean hike in terza rima. Pollock muses, too, on figures from Canadian history--explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin, the critic Northrop Frye, the pianist Glenn Gould. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, a treasure-chest mapped for discovery, "an image of the world/ made small enough to hold inside the mind." A book with the power to take you "to the place/ exactly where you always meant to go."Finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry PrizeFinalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award in PoetryRunner-Up for the 2013 Posner Poetry Book AwardWinner of a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association.PRAISE FOR SAILING TO BABYLON:"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 . . . . 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, Judge's Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist"Pollock shines brightly in 'Quarry Park,' a long poem . . . . The tight terza rima format showcases [his] poetic discipline . . . . [He] blithely hints at the Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise while creating a rich complex of his own past, his son's future, the childhood games of a boy (also named James) who once lived in the quarry, the glacier called "Huge Toad" by the Huron, and the Rowan-tree mythology of the Gaels, all without losing the immediate beauty of the ecology of the place itself, rendered through carefully detailed images. The poem moves gracefully through the woods at an easy pace for over twenty pages, never making a false step or departing from the idiomatic tone, sweeping readers along through the magical dimensions of the real, and the real dimensions of the magical, showing how beautiful are "the ruins that prevail/ even in the midst of death; how we forget/ and how our forgetting makes us homeless, / until we dig ourselves out of this debt/ we owe the giant past for making us ourselves."- Brent Wood, University of Toronto Quarterly