Little Gods [Paperback]

We've all heard of 'dirty realism'. Jacob Polley goes in for that drab, soggy, sordid species of pastoral perhaps best exemplified by the wonderful Sean O'Brien. (In fact, it's as much to do with urban and suburban life as it is to do with the countryside . . .) Sorry to disagree with one of your other reviewers, but this has very little in common with the poetry of Ted Hughes (to make such a comparison is to miss the point). The best things about these really most impressive poems are their astonishing musicality (the use both of end-rhyme and internal rhyme is masterly, and the rhythms are precisely calculated), the originality of their phrasing, and their sureness of tone. So far as the latter is concerned, Polley creates a variety of characters, all of them marginal (Sally Somewhere seems to be an elderly relative who's 'lost it' in both a literal and metaphorical sense, the 'boy in the byre' is one of those tatterdemalion young Tom o' Bedlams that haunt English literature from King Lear to Bleak House, and the 'You' in the astonishingly confident poem with that as its title is a sort of modern John Clare, homeless and on the run . . .): what's quite dazzling is his blend of the literary and the demotic in the language he deploys to bring them to life. One moment we encounter wholly idiosyncratic collocations like 'the lumpy, guileless country', and the next we're having our noses rubbed in gritty contemporary slang like 'scranning' (which I loved at first sight, but which I still had to look up in the 'Urban Dictionary' [http://www.urbandictionary.com/] to be sure that I'd fully understood it). There are quite a few poems that are either direct translations or imitations of Baudelaire, or clearly inspired by him (the slightly over the top Twilight---which I still like a lot---begins with a straight crib from Le Crepuscule du Soir and then wanders off in quite a different direction) and there are several stylish exercises in the sonnet form, or something very like it. But above all, despite the sense that he hasn't quite yet found his subject-matter, there is an intensity of vision and a maturity of style that mark Polley out as one of the most promising poets of his generation. Not since Glyn Maxwell or Sean O'Brien has there been such an exciting new English voice (though O'Brien probably wouldn't like to be tagged with that term, for all his love of Ravilious watercolours and warped nostalgia for the Fifties). Read him now, and tell your grandchildren that you were there first!

I will admit to not being a very regular poetry reader, and it is somewhat difficult for me to find poetry that really grabs me. This is one collection that manages to do just that, and being from Carlisle (as is the author) I recognise many of the places described or referred to, and the poems really hauntingly bring the places to mind. There is something of the ghostliness of childhood remembered.
I have also had the pleasure of hearing Jacob read in person and that was a really lovely and moving event. I especially recommend 'Brew', which is so lovely, moving and also very cleverly done. Please excuse my abysmally unpoetic language in commenting on this work of art!!

This is an astounding book. From the first poem 'The Owls' it becomes clear that Jacob Polley has fulfilled the promise attributed to him by so many critics following the widely acclaimed 'The Brink'.

The collection covers so many themes, places and ways of seeing, yet ultimately feels like a consistent collection of poems made to be together. Between (and within poems) there feels to be a sense of being fully grounded in the countryside or say a town at dusk and yet somehow also a sense of something more, something even more powerful or transcendent that can't or doesn't need to be tied down or labelled.

Personally I haven't read a poem as good as 'Decree' in a long long time. But so much of this work stays with the reader long after the book has been put down: both in terms of images ('from the top bar of a five-bar gate hangs/the green world stilled in a water seed' from Rain) to the rhythm (of You `You avoiding main roads. You warming your hands on a cow./ You on the outskirts, an industrial estate/where the kerbs are high and the corrugated sheds/ hum and grind as their arc-lit interiors swing.' And most of all the contained sensitivity of the emotions here; the almost unspoken pleading love of `Brew', the masked self of "Decree' or the bereft lover fearing what he may become (Telephone').

This is an extremely ambitious and powerful set of poems, being both highly complex yet also accessible. It has a sense of permanence about it, the kind of collection that people will be drawn back to time and again...