[Alex Pepple]

Dear Eratosphereans:

I'm pleased to announce that Sailing to Babylon, the first full-length collection from James Pollock has been released by Able Muse Press and is immediately available worldwide through Amazon, Barnes & Nobles and most popular distribution and retail channels here (ISBN 978-0-9865338-7-7). Or, just go to James's website, www.james-pollock.com, or the Able Muse Press website, www.ablemusepress.com. Besides the traditional print edition, an Amazon Kindle and a Barnes & Nobles NOOK digital editions are also available now. An Apple iTunes/iBooks digital edition should also be available soon.

Please, join me in congratulating James!

Sailing to Babylon - poems by James Pollock
(with a Foreword by Jeffery Donaldson):
Blurbs from Edward Hirsch and Sven Birkerts--

Sailing to Babylon is the first full-length collection from James Pollock. These are poems of exploration and discovery of the self and the universal. Closer to home, there is the schoolboy fascination with the English teacher; the grandmother's old Bible; a Dantean-style extended account of a hiking adventure with a young son, fully realized in terza rima. Further out in time and geography, Pollock muses on figures from Canadian history—explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin; pioneering literary theorist Northrop Frye; and pianist Glenn Gould. Each of these quests has accompanying trials or triumphs. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, with a treasure-chest mapped for discovery in “an image of the world/ made small enough to hold inside the mind.” A book that has the power to take you “to the place/ exactly where you always meant to go.”

"You will hear in these poems something like the jouncing and ruckus of a wilderness traveler adjusting the gear on his back, steeling his resolve, finding his footings and heading off. In the end Pollock’s departures are an exploration of that inward Northwest Passage where the borderlines themselves between real and imagined, the present and the past, the found and the lost, seem almost to dissolve—passages, as Pollock says, “breaking up within”—and where, in this anthem of mixed voices, our wondering where home is becomes our wandering where home is. . . . I would almost prefer to be the reviewer, or some boastful exegete revealing to readers one hundred years from now some of the untold treasures that, its many readers notwithstanding, lie hidden here still."
                                                                                     – Jeffery Donaldson (from the Foreword)

. . . read more

Order your copy now!

Cheers,
...Alex