Reviews

• poetry with an novel rhythm

• I bought this because it had such good reviews but, perhaps because I am Canadian, I really couldn’t follow the references and so there was little poetic resonance for me. I am not saying it isn’t well-written but I just couldn’t find much to enjoy in it.

• T. S. Eliot prize winner, what more can I say! Great mix of sound & story set in the English countryside. Do yourself a favor and read! Polley has delivered deliciously.

• It was a packed house at the Southbank Centre Royal Festival Hall in London on Jan. 16. Ten poets were reading from their works, all nominated for the most prestigious award in British poetry – the T.S Eliot Foundation’s T.S. Eliot Prize. The prize is also a financial one – 20,000 pounds (about $26,000 at current exchange rates). Each of the 10 shortlisted nominees received 1,500 pounds (about $1,900). Bernard O’Donoghue was there, reading from “The Seasons of Cullen Church.” Vahni Capildeo read from “Measures of Expatriation.” With the other eight, they represent some of the British poets writing today. The winner was “Jackself”by Cumbrian poet Jacob Polley. Polley, 41, teaches at the University of Newcastle. He’s the author of three previous poetry collections: “The Brink” (2003); “Little Gods” (2006); and “The Havocs” (2012). Both “The Brink” and “The Havocs” were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Polley has also published a coming-of-age murder mystery, “Talk of the Town,” which won the Somerset Maugham Award. The prize judges called “Jackself” a “firecracker of a book,” and it is certainly that. It is a work centered in Polley’s birthplace of Cumbria in northwestern England, which encompasses the Lake District and was also the home of English poet Norman Nicholson. But where Nicholson explored the landscape and the environment, Polley explores the folklore of the region, along with the poems many of us learned in childhood that originated in the area or nearby. Cumbria is an area rich in tradition and history. The western end of Hadrian’s Wall terminates there; it was the heart of the fabled medieval kingdom of Rheged; it felt the impact of English-Scottish wars for centuries; and the Lake District was home to such writers as Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth. In the poetry collection, Polley creates two children on the verge of growing up – Jackself and his friend (and partner in mischief) Jeremy Wren. The two ramble through a childhood of folk tales and landscape in a sense become the folk tales and stories of childhood – Jack Frost, Jack Sprat, Jack O’Lantern, the house that Jack built, and Jack O’Bedlam are both characters and poem titles. But they stand for something else, something beyond folk tales and stories; they stand for the age of childhood itself. An Age Jackself is staying in today, like a tool in a tool box, to try to just be high in the lovely lofts of Lamanby he stands at a cracked window watching the gulls flash and snap, like washing on a line in the pale heat the wormy heartwood floorboards swell and creak he stands for an age not for a dark age, not for an ice age or an iron age, but for a pollen age, when bees browsed the workshops of wildflowers for powder of light, and the cables of a spider's web were dusted with gold by the unreceptacled breeze “ackself doesn't stand for "an ice age or an iron age, but for a / pollen age." He's describing childhood (I love that phrase "a pollen age") and the lines that flow from childhood, dusting that spider's web with gold. It's beautiful imagery. All 34 poems of “Jackself” have this kind of vivid imagining and combined playfulness and seriousness, and it’s this creativity that the Eliot Prize judges recognized.

• nicht größer bestellen. habe normalerweise S und habe M bestellt, weil ich dachte, er würde kleiner ausfallen, muss jetzt die träger kurzen.

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