David Pollard shares with many poets the preoccupation with the limitations of language in his compelling collection, Bird of Oblivion. He approaches the painful subject of a loved one’s dementia obliquely, often using nautical metaphors to explore how it feels to be utterly powerless. This distancing technique frees him to write with unflinching honesty, taking the reader straight to the heart of suffering. In the disorienting ‘North East Shingles’, the speaker describes the experience of sailing ‘at the world’s edge’:
…no smell of flowers or bell or echoes
or hope that the ringing stones may sing again
only the melancholy whisper of a high furled banner
waving the stars into confusion.
‘Confusion’ echoes Genesis 11, in which ‘the Lord confused the language of the whole world’. The Tower of Babel is a recurring motif, symbolising the fragmentation of speech and the longing for a mythical shared language. Pollard is transforming a personal experience of chaos into something timeless and universal. The withdrawal of the senses (smell is often the first sense to be affected by dementia), and the chaotic blurring of sail and stars, poignantly evoke the bewilderment of both patient and carer. The flowing, unpunctuated lines and surging rhythm mirror the energy of the sea, while the hissing ‘s’ sounds and tolling ‘o’ sounds give these lines a haunting music.
The darkness in this collection is illuminated by moments of grace, as in ‘Gehenna’ – abode of the dead in the Jewish afterlife. Set at 3am, ‘that loneliest moment/the dew cannot refresh…’, the speaker invokes an absent deity. Prayer fails him but in the depths of silence, he hears a mysterious music:
He who cannot bless himself can hear the rhythm
of the wind in the long reeds that bend
at its command and let it pass over the wild white steppe
along the dancing letters…
There is a psalm-like beauty to these lines. Swept along by the rhythm and the gentle chiming of words such as ‘bless’ and ‘bend’, the reader senses the speaker’s will to carry on, the image of reeds as ‘dancing letters’ suggesting he can once again find meaning in the world. The speaker’s quest for meaning is precarious, almost breaking down in the moving elegy, ‘Blackbird, my blackbird’, which is split into fragments. The final section is composed entirely of questions: ‘…with what words can such days as these be climbed?’ There is no answer but, while the collection is exploring the breakdown of communication, it is also a remarkable articulation of loss. The image of the blackbird is a hopeful one, reminding the reader of the opening ‘Love Poem’ – a poem as sensuous and song-like as any love poem by Pablo Neruda (the title, ‘Bird of Oblivion’ comes from Neruda). Out of the ‘raucous silence’ of a loved one’s absence, Pollard has created an intensely lyrical work, rich in allusions.
Elizabeth Barton – Agenda
David Pollard brings a lifetime’s intellectual stringency to his work, yet never loses sight of the human heart. In Bird of Oblivion, his lyrical gifts have found a deep seam of emotion. Here are poems which hang together as if written in a single sweep. And yet each remains a quiet gem with its own story to unpack.
On one level, Bird of Oblivion is a moving response to his wife’s deepening dementia. But like all the best poetry, it invites different interpretations of its core theme. Loss is ultimately a journey we all travel. Though bleak, loss is not without its compensations. These poems suggest we can look for, and sometimes recover, something of the essence of what has slipped away. The collection opens with ‘Love Poem’:
“. . . It seems no time since we lay down
into an oblivion of time’s vain dawn
in the ruby wound of our watch
and rode the river past the tatters
we had shaken off of all the world
and sparrows were in the rosebush of your hair . . .”
One of the pleasures of this collection is the richness of its language: cadences that flow like rivers, sonorities that cry out for performance. And always the sea, which is “black as widows’ eyes”, “the tide rolls with a sound like sin”, “for here there is no turning,/ only the lie of the sea and the lie of the word/ and the spit of rocks just beyond the audible.”
And under it all, a current of Biblical and Shakespearian allusions that surface so subtely:
“There are no shadows here
only my eyes of coral
and the rupture of my words for I am
deaf and blind but with a voice (not mute)
a fisher of white blood and torments
and all the cargoes of the seas
escape my net.”
In ‘South Foreland Light’, we enter the tone and cadences of Revelations and Exodus.
“I saw the dead of all our days
leap just below the surface
as the white underbelly of a fish
rising from the deeps . . .
Thus had is wound its way through all the words
that housed our exile into too many tongues . . .”
Occasionally, Pollard’s sure ear lets itself be bamboozled. I wasn’t keen on “a thwarm of death” or “whelmed by darkness”, but for one false note there are so many seductive sound moments such as in ‘Bullwell South Cardinal’:
“ . . . Those pearls are like my mother’s smile no longer
as all the trammels of my will are laid to rest
amid the rubbish of dead fish and drying oils
along the blue and bleak and patter of rain . . .
and by the wide and midnight jaws of all the skies.”
Pollard’s many years as an amateur sailor weaves a nautical leitmotiv through much of the collection. Towards the end of ‘Love Poem’, the sea becomes threatening:
“ . . . and we ignored the coming gale
and its rising roar as an alchemy of unkind metals
cast all meaning out and the following wind
betrayed the past and we were blood
and bone of ourselves and fleeing over the waters.
and you had blackbirds on your bright tongue
that brings me comfort still.”
The sea metaphor is mist-like in its opacity. In ‘East Bramble Cardinal’:
“She is sleek our schooner against the hailing
call of the spray whose meaning is inaudible
in the midst of so much calling. . . .
There is no telling here
only the rocking bell astern
and pull of canvas drawing our memories
forward with us into a lack of speech
into the sodden skin of loss
turning the wake that broils behind us
into a dissonance of blood and bone. . . .”
By eschewing commas, Pollard creates a sense of inevitability, a force that can’t be controlled, a breathless rush towards fate: “. . . beyond the currents of past love/ and our failed way of telling it/ and on/ and on/ past the buoy’s long wesward tolling on the tide.”
Sometimes the pain of loss is depicted visually and rhythmically in splintered phrases, as in ‘The Day of Ashes’, where the final word is literally “silence”.
The penultimate poem, ‘Blackbird, my blackbird’ is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful sequence of twelve short pieces. Everything that makes Pollard an important poet is here.
“Blackbird, my blackbird with your crooked wing
struggling along the dust
and cradle of our hopes:
your plaintive call so godless and unkind
can reach our ears no longer . . .
“I ask you gentle reader, gentle spirit, gentle friend
with what words can such days as these by climbed?”
If anyone has found the words, it’s David Pollard.
Claire Booker – Tears in The Fence