Durable Goods

by James Pollock

"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 poetic catalogue of ordinary things 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 makes 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

Genres: Poetry

75 pages, Paperback

Published September 1, 2022

About the author

James Pollock is the author of Sailing to Babylon (Able Muse Press, 2012), a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize and the Governor General's Literary Award in Poetry, and winner of an Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association; and You Are Here: Essays on the Art of Poetry in Canada (The Porcupine's Quill, 2012), a finalist for the ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award for a collection of essays. He is also editor of The Essential Daryl Hine (The Porcupine's Quill), which made The Partisan's list of the best books of 2015. A new book of his poems, Durable Goods, is forthcoming from Véhicule Press/Signal Editions in 2022. His poems have appeared in The Paris Review, AGNI, The Walrus, and many other journals. They have won the Manchester Poetry Prize, the Magma Editors' Prize, and the Guy Owen Prize from Southern Poetry Review, and have been reprinted in anthologies in Canada, the U.S., and the U.K., including The Next Wave: An Anthology of 21st Century Canadian Poetry. His essays and reviews have appeared in Contemporary Poetry Review, Canadian Notes & Queries, Literary Review of Canada, and elsewhere. He graduated from York University in Toronto, earned a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and is now Professor of English at Loras College. He lives with his wife and son in Madison, Wisconsin.

Reviews

[Tina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Durable Goods by James Pollock is a fun collection about various goods like teaspoon, kettle and umbrella just to name a few. From the front flap: “For Pollock, the most durable good is language itself.” and it’s evident in this book. I loved the whimsy and play with language.

Thank you to Vehicule Press for my gifted review copy!

[Alice]

Proofread the manuscript as part of my publishing internship!

[Vicki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Refreshing, inventive, entertaining poetry - with the added bonus of another eye-catching, stellar book cover design so in harmony with the work, by David Drummond

[Christina Barber · Rating 4 out of 5]

I came across James Pollock’s “Durable Goods” in a friend’s review and was intrigued by the concept of poetry about everyday objects that surround us. While the objects rendered in this collection of poetry might be quotidian, the poems themselves reach greater depths and often present the souls of those machines, tools, and devices that add to our clutter, that produce our home’s ambiance, and otherwise serve as constant companions. Straightforward rhyming schemes shelter clever enjambments. The vocabulary is often whimsical while elevating the status of humble day-to-day props. Overall, “Durable Goods” was an enjoyable read.

[Peggy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fun collection of poems about household goods that use rhymed quatrains as their vehicle. Pollack uses the vocabulary of each utensil's parts, adds sound effects, and presents fitting, surprising imagery to explore and uncover something more than function. Poems read lightly, but truth lurks in each, as in the pencil, "what keeps it sharp can be what grinds it down." Suddenly my kitchen appliances seem more than machinery to me.

[Caitlin Buxbaum · Rating 4 out of 5]

Clever and pleasant. Some rhymes/line breaks were a little iffy but I love the concept of the collection.