Bird of Oblivion

By David Pollard

' David Pollard has the poet's 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.

The flowing, unpunctuated lines and surging rhythm mirror the energy of the sea. The darkness in this collection is illuminated by moments of grace.

There is a psalm-like beauty in these lines. The speaker's quest for meaning is precarious, almost breaking down in the moving elegy,
 

Agenda Review

 

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:

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.".

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/ an

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.

 

Tears in The Fence Review

• Language: English
• Publisher: David Pollard
• Release date: Apr 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781908527448

David Pollard

David Pollard has been furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his three degrees from the University of Sussex and has since taught at the universities of Sussex, Essex and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem where he was a Lady Davis Scholar. His doctoral thesis was published as: The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience (Harvester and Barnes & Noble). He has also published A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition of Keats’ Letters, a novel, Nietzsche’s Footfalls (Self-published) and seven volumes of poetry, patricides, Risk of Skin, Self-Portraits and Broken Voices (all from Waterloo Press), bedbound (from Perdika), Three Artists (from Lapwing) and Finis-terre (from Agenda translated into Portuguese - Lumme Editor and Spanish - Rialta). He has translated from Gallego, French and German. He has also been published in other volumes and in learned journals and many reputable poetry magazines. He divides his time between Brighton on the South coast of England and a village on the Rias of Galicia.

Book preview

Love Poem

It seems no time since on the meadow grass

you played your shy eyes into my torment

and we leant to our very first berry lipped kiss

and beat of heartsbreath in one voice

and our staysail filled with a good wind.

and the crook of your arm was honey dark.

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

It seems no time since it was easy

to make a need or meet a need

as the tiller eased the keel

along our thoroughfare of close skin

tongued with wine and eyelids licked with night.

and you had the wings of a skylark in your breast.

It seems no time since they dropped behind

to live their rags and spiders’ webs on the high banks

while you and I like fishermen with golden oars sculled

out of port under the banner of a million stars

between moon and moon and drunk the salt of the sea.

and your eyes were emerald green with my longing.

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.

Over the bar

The keening echo of a bell

wheels with the cries of gulls above the swell

words here can weave their own fine