Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 86 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-28-4
“I sleep in fever, if at all.” With Parse Poetica, Estill Pollock concludes his multi-volume fever-dream cycle Cartographic Projections of a Sphere, preceded by Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, and Alias, collectively an opus both magnum and magnificent, encompassing seemingly all western culture and history in poems of myriad styles, demonstrating his mastery of all. The present volume can be read very much on its own and as distillation of Pollock’s poetry program. Critiquing his own work, he describes “My late style—ungrammatical, perplexed / and obscure, remote sources / with six degrees of separation / Truants from Chaucer,” and Chaucer indeed makes frequent appearance along with a host of characters out of the literature and life of Pollock’s long adopted England. But he also casts a contemporary transatlantic eye to the “rent-a-mob platforms / of DOGE, ICE and antivax disclaimers” and “MAGA flags, wind-snap logos on / the street where I was born” in his native Kentucky, USA. Concluding both this work and the cycle, he observes “And here, traces of a deeper salvage—old entreaties beyond a certainty / of place—where I am, or was, when I awoke / to name the turning of it.”
Praise for Estill Pollock
In Entropy, we find a visionary collection of stark and unflinching reflections that we need for these times.
—Alexander Pepple, Editor, Able Muse
Estill Pollock’s Time Signatures is a hugely ambitious and, in the end, wonderfully achieved engagement with longer poetic forms. Unique also is Pollock’s exploration of history, ideas and the lives of cultural icons.
—David Cooke, founder and editor of The High Window
Language, for [Pollock], is a precision instrument he uses to think through everything that interests him. And everything, it seems, interests him. I would go so far as to call Pollock a planetary man. His Ark is built to last, to ride out the flood tide of the 21st century that is still and always coming in.
Reading Heathen Anthems, I find myself thinking: What is poetry, if not language in its finer tunings? Estill Pollock is a virtuoso. Heathen Anthems is a book to keep close, a book to return to and return to.
—William Slaughter, Editor of Mudlark
Of Alias,
Wild connections, wilder metaphors, and somehow it all makes poetic, delightful sense.
—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal
About the Author
Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press). His poetry collections in the series, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere—Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, Alias, and Parse Poetica—are all published by Broadstone Books. The e-chapbooks And Then and Working Title are published by Mudlark. He lives in Norfolk, England.
Publication Date: December 15, 2025
Paperback, 86 pages
ISBN: 978-1-966677-28-4
“I sleep in fever, if at all.” With Parse Poetica, Estill Pollock concludes his multi-volume fever-dream cycle Cartographic Projections of a Sphere, preceded by Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, and Alias, collectively an opus both magnum and magnificent, encompassing seemingly all western culture and history in poems of myriad styles, demonstrating his mastery of all. The present volume can be read very much on its own and as distillation of Pollock’s poetry program. Critiquing his own work, he describes “My late style—ungrammatical, perplexed / and obscure, remote sources / with six degrees of separation / Truants from Chaucer,” and Chaucer indeed makes frequent appearance along with a host of characters out of the literature and life of Pollock’s long adopted England. But he also casts a contemporary transatlantic eye to the “rent-a-mob platforms / of DOGE, ICE and antivax disclaimers” and “MAGA flags, wind-snap logos on / the street where I was born” in his native Kentucky, USA. Concluding both this work and the cycle, he observes “And here, traces of a deeper salvage—old entreaties beyond a certainty / of place—where I am, or was, when I awoke / to name the turning of it.”
Praise for Estill Pollock
In Entropy, we find a visionary collection of stark and unflinching reflections that we need for these times.
—Alexander Pepple, Editor, Able Muse
Estill Pollock’s Time Signatures is a hugely ambitious and, in the end, wonderfully achieved engagement with longer poetic forms. Unique also is Pollock’s exploration of history, ideas and the lives of cultural icons.
—David Cooke, founder and editor of The High Window
Language, for [Pollock], is a precision instrument he uses to think through everything that interests him. And everything, it seems, interests him. I would go so far as to call Pollock a planetary man. His Ark is built to last, to ride out the flood tide of the 21st century that is still and always coming in.
Reading Heathen Anthems, I find myself thinking: What is poetry, if not language in its finer tunings? Estill Pollock is a virtuoso. Heathen Anthems is a book to keep close, a book to return to and return to.
—William Slaughter, Editor of Mudlark
Of Alias,
Wild connections, wilder metaphors, and somehow it all makes poetic, delightful sense.
—Ricardo Nirenberg, Offcourse Literary Journal
About the Author
Estill Pollock’s publications include Constructing the Human (Poetry Salzburg) and the book cycle Relic Environments Trilogy (Cinnamon Press). His poetry collections in the series, Cartographic Projections of a Sphere—Entropy, Time Signatures, Ark, Heathen Anthems, Alias, and Parse Poetica—are all published by Broadstone Books. The e-chapbooks And Then and Working Title are published by Mudlark. He lives in Norfolk, England.
