Writing-wise, poetry is a bit of an odd duck. The usual dichotomies–fact or fiction, story or discussion, present or past–don’t apply, as a poem can be all of these things, or none of them. Ideas that might seem ridiculous in a novel or story or play can, in poetry, become poignant. Toothpaste, for example. Ever wondered how the tube feels, alone on the sink all day, until some monstrous hand picks it up and squeezes it dry? No? Author Stephen Pollock has. As he writes in “Tube,” one of the poems in his collection EXITS, “In the end, / after all the paste is secreted / and drained as waste, / and my tube is a rumpled wreck of tin, / I still persist– / not dead or empty, just / depleted.” We’ve all been there, haven’t we?
EXITS consists of eighteen poems, both formal and free verse. The formal poems are the best. Some are sonnets as artful as any by Shakespeare or Ben Jonson. Others use structures of Pollock’s own devising. Rhyme and meter are strongest when they are unobtrusive, and a great example of that is in “War Crimes,” when, as a child, he tortures a butterfly, then muses, “I could not have known that day / of bodies burned, of lives, lost, / or mused how cruelty and war / were seared in our DNA, / could not have seen what came before– / the camps, the gas, the Holocaust.” Arguably the finest poem in the collection in “Nasal Biopsy,” which puns on the two meanings of “mass”–tumor and religious service–before wondering, “Is it fair / that a god should mete out grace or despair / in proportion to fealty.” We tend to think of “despair” as the absence of God, not one of His creations. Such different ways of imagining are at the heart of Pollock’s poetry. The author brings the precision of a surgeon (his day job is ophthalmologist) to his work, which has won a number of awards. The book has a commentary section that doesn’t need to be present–explaining a poem is as self-defeating as explaining a joke–but this doesn’t diminish his achievement, which is that EXITS is a book to be read over and over.
Full of wit, insight, and provocative imagery, EXITS is a masterful collection by award-winning poet Stephen C. Pollock.
~Anthony Aycock for IndieReader