Little Gods

by Jacob Polley

While Jacob Polley`s first collection, The Brink , announced a poet of great promise, few readers will be prepared for a work of the mature and slow power of Little Gods . Polley has been guided more and more by old-fashioned lyric inspiration of the sort all too rare in contemporary English poetry. In the quiet, insistent chants of his love poems and in his almost occult conjurings of time and place, Polley achieves both a directness of expression and unsentimental intimacy of address that only a poet of very considerable gifts could even attempt. Little Gods unequivocally announces Polley as one of the leading British poets of his generation. Praise for The Brink : `The kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent` Guardian `A sparkling collection of crystalline poems, succinct in their observation, precise in their form` The Times

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published May 1, 2008

About the author

Jacob Polley was born in Carlisle, Cumbria. He is the author of three acclaimed books of poems, The Brink (2003), Little Gods (2006) and The Havocs (2012), all published by Picador, UK. He received an Eric Gregory Award in 2002, and both The Brink and The Havocs were shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

In 2011, he was Arts Queensland’s poet-in-residence, and he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Arts at Trinity College, Cambridge, 2005-7. He has also held residencies at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation and at the Wordsworth Trust.

In 2004, he was named one of the ‘Next Generation’ of the twenty best new poets in Britain. His first novel, Talk of the Town, a fiercely demotic and funny coming-of-age murder mystery, won the 2010 Somerset Maugham Award. He teaches at the University of St Andrews and lives in Fife, Scotland.

Reviews

[SallyandBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not read much poetry but tend to like the more contemporary stuff rather than the William Shakespeare type.

Saw this cheap in a Charity shop, it was the cover that drew me to it and then I saw the title 'Little Gods' and just knew I had to own it and read it.

So now I am reading it......

I have sat down and read this from cover to cover. I'm no expert on reading poetry but I feel this is the first one I have read and really enjoyed nearly all the poems.

I will definitely re read this little 'gem of a book' again and soon.

[Eris Varga · Rating 4 out of 5]

The knife's not a fish,
though it's cold from the drawer;
and the birch leaves aren't cymbals, though they're blown
silver-side-up in the wind, which won't show you
death in a cistern's slab of black water:
only your own untroubled face.

Ugh. How does a poem feel like cold, or rain? My poetry tutor gifted this to me in uni and he nailed it - clearly he knew what I liked before I did.

I thought I'd reviewed this one but evidently I had missed a few and was holding off. I like a lot in this collection and even those I'm less fond of had a line which hit me. No one does the bleakness and beauty of nature like northerners (IMO). Truly these poems feel like home, and all the screaming one hears in the fields.

Polley is a master of the 'small moments' and object poems for sure.

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Polley’s quite good! He does the rhymes in this day and age for this day and age and it doesn’t get repetitive. That’s certainly commendable! Plus he’s fun, known his area of humour, yet to become unforgettable though!

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

There is a quiet sadness to this collection, which Polley manages to make atmospheric and, at times, powerful, using relatively simple concepts and language. I really liked the first half of the collection, but the second not so much. I also tended to love individual stanzas and lines within poems more than the poem as a whole; eg. the first stanza of 'Skin and Bone'. There are a couple of poems that felt like fillers, in that they didn't have the same provocativeness as the rest; and although I didn't like all the poems, I did like that I found myself wanting to read every poem, and then to re-read it. I would be interested to read anything Jacob Polley writes.