Durable Goods

Durable Goods is a book of a sharply imagined poems about everyday technology. Writing in the Dinggedicht or thing-poem tradition of poets like Rilke, Ponge, and Marianne Moore, James Pollock calls to surprising life everything from microwaves to kettles, sprinklers to umbrellas, with a precision both unerring and effortless. By conjuring the essential spirit of each object, the poet reveals the tools and appliances that surround us as both sympathetic reflections of ourselves—our fear, love, rage, hope, and grief—and strange beings with inner lives of their own. “It knows how much pressure you’ve been under,” Pollock writes, of the barometer, “that you could use a change of atmosphere.” Read together, these poems immerse us in an imagined world with the power to make us see our own in a new way. Suffused with dazzling wordplay, razor wit, and rippling sonic effects, the poems richly reward being read aloud. Indeed, for Pollock, the most durable good is language itself.

About the Author :
James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon (2012), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Award in Poetry. His prizes include the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review. His other books include You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (2012) and The Essential Daryl Hine (2015). He grew up in southern Ontario, Canada, and is now Professor of English at Loras College. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.

Review :
"The poetic catalogue of ordinary things that James Pollock creates in Durable Goods is wry and bracingly dark. The poet's cool eye on the everyday makes the familiar strange, as objects seem to conspire to educate us in a dire metaphysic. An oscillating fan is "a time-lapse sunflower in a cage"; a dishwasher is a "crazed assault/on indifferent death itself." But there's pleasure, even joy here as well: the genuine delight of naming precisely, of making an elegant architecture of meaning out of the stubborn, contrary things that surround us." -- Mark Doty "James Pollock's latest collection, Durable Goods, presents a speaker able to mine seemingly insignificant objects for the astonishing. These elegant but intimate poems echo the very best of Tony Harrison and James Merrill--works which, beneath the sparkle of their cheeky humour, exhale with vulnerability and generosity and edge towards the oracular." -- Alexandra Oliver "The short descriptive poems in James Pollock's Durable Goods are not . . . riddles. If they were, they'd do themselves a great disservice by giving away their answers in their titles. But in a deeper way: they are riddles, in that they are also little metaphor machines that generate figurative description. What Pollock's poems feature . . . is a really complicated and interesting relationship with sense. This is accomplished not at all by powering down the metaphor machine but by sending it on a number of detours . . . . They are refreshingly, interestingly, less task-oriented riddles. They're jaunts; not errands." -- Jacob McArthur Mooney​"[A] minimalist overflowing characterizes the compact poems in [Durable Goods] . . . . Pollock's wit is on display in every quatrain . . . [and] the surfeit of wit . . . stirs and measures language, emotion, and meaning . . . . Reversal, pivot, and hinge rely on Pollock's deft rhythm and punctuation . . . . [M]imetic double turns are held in place by the stanza's structure and traditional rhyme and rhythms--a refreshing departure from contemporary free verse . . . . Synecdoche or the part for the whole is one of the keys to these poems, for each durable good forms part of a larger ensemble . . . . Pollock makes us see both sides of the ordinary as he spins and stirs his objects and perspectives, always making the familiar a little strange, so that we notice it in a different light. . . . Like Prospero, Pollock invokes the elemental through . . . quatrains that transform the quotidian . . . . [These] durable goods [are] personified to come alive." -- Michael Greenstein, The Miramichi Reader