SAILING TO BABYLON

Finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize
 
Finalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry
 
Runner-Up for the 2013 Posner Poetry Book Award
 
Winner of a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association
 
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."
 
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

James Pollock is the author of Durable Goods (Véhicule Press/Signal Editions), which won the Edna Meudt Poetry Book Award and made The Miramichi Reader's list of the best poetry books of 2022; and Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and winner of an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association. He is also the author of You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (The Porcupine's Quill, 2012), a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays; and editor of The Essential Daryl Hine (The Porcupine's Quill), which made Partisan magazine's list of the best books of 2015. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, Plume, The Walrus, and many other journals. They have also won the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and have been reprinted in anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. He graduated from York University in Toronto, earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and is now Professor of English at Loras College. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.