A Book Club on Death Row
 
The Gardener’s Almanac
contributes to routine, the screws quipping
‘life’s no bed of roses’—a joke
repeated to the captive crowd
each week, calming any nerves
about their lawyers’ visits.
 
After all, what good is ad-lib
when the straws they drew were short?
 
Donated books the staple, before
the rounds the pages fanned
for corner crimps or glossaries
soaked in spice—but time
to talk books is what they crave.
 
A few read well—their crime
offset by Degree, by night classes
or in-house at the factory:
for others, rap sheets spooling years
from truancy to murder, each sentence a mountain
big as any sentence on the row.
 
Jane Austen was here, library
castoffs stacked ten titles deep, but
Pride and Prejudice was tougher fare
than solitary—the lingo
too much like solicitors’.
 
Over the west wall, a drone
tries its luck—spot-lit from the towers
it snags the nets, then clatters
to the yard below.
 
Someone calls out in the dark,
‘What page you on?’ The answer: ‘At lights-out
the bit where the best friend gets it
for stuffing the wife.’
In the darkness—a silent nod.
 
The one reading Nietzsche
no longer speaks—at night his laughter
rattles through the cells and walkways,
but that was since his last Appeal, his life
mimicking the chapters now, with
a final date and time.
 
No one likes a snitch, and no one
wants to know how everything will end—
the spoiler alert, twenty years coming,
every character in place
for the long walk to the chamber: a page
torn out, folded in a pocket.

Estill Pollock

Heathen Anthems

Publication Date: December 15, 2024 Paperback, 108 pages ISBN: 978-1-956782-85-1 Two things characterize Estill Pollock’s poetry: thematically, he seemingly is interested in everything, and nothing escapes his observation; while stylistically, he is equally at home in free and formal verse, exhibiting a subtle mastery of both. This once again is evident in his most recent collection Heathen Anthems, the title evoking praisesong for the profane world that embodies the sacred. Parsed into three sections, the first is a “Hall of Mirrors” reflecting his vast catalogue of concerns, ranging from his long-ago childhood in Kentucky (“I wanted to return to the deep woods, / quiet places and paths a wild boy took”) across the landscape – literal and literary – of his adopted England and the wider realms of history and culture, past and contemporary worlds intermingled. These themes continue into the middle section “The Discipline of Clouds,” in which the discipline takes the form of ABABCC sestinas that do not so much impose order as expose it, scrying a preexisting state of being. In the closing section “The Natural Order” his focus tightens, opening with poems sketching vivid portraits of everyday people all caught in “The Undertow” of life, then a persona poem of seductive “Sirens,” a “Creole Diary” conjuring an antebellum Louisiana, finally ending in a meditation on “Local Spirits” – “This is our inheritance, once / the oldest season is upon us…. // The heartbeat slows to winter’s pace, / the names our shadows memorised / before we came.”

The book can be ordered from: https://www.broadstonebooks.com/shop/p/heathen-anthems-poetry-by-estill-pollock

If you have any thoughts about this poem or this publication, Estill Pollock  would be pleased to hear them