Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Safe Bet, 16 Jan 2004
By A Customer
I find it easier to put my finger on what I like about this book than what I'm not so sure.Yes, I love the textures of the language, the music of these bare-bones poems of lansdcape, home and the outside elements. Polley makes strange wonderfully, and he has a fine ear. There is a confidence at work here - the writer has a clear feel for his territory and he writes out of that feel. The simplicity of this formula is winning and reassuring. Perhaps it is also part of what leaves me feeling a little uncomfortable. Polley's subject matter - his range of reference - is conservative - he rarely pushes out from this terraine of nature, landscape, home, creatures. Also, the emotional spectrum of the poems is quite narrow and very controlled. The writer is rarely turned upside down by his subject matter - it seems to come from a comfort zone now too famillar in poetry. It is a poetry of calm amazement - held breath and wide eyed wonder. It isn't shallow or superficial, but it rarely courts disturbance or interrogates itself. Perhaps this will change as the poet gets older and he develops more courage to explore, both internally and externally. I hope market forces or the temptation to be popular don't contribute to limiting this talented poet's growth. My biggest gripe is with the blurb. Do Picador need to keep telling us who the 'best new writers' are? Jacob Polley is the best thing, snce, well, Paul Farley, who is, well, another Picador poet. Please, let us make up our own minds. We don't need to be preached at to be converted. We don't all need league tables.
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Our kings' bones, 7 Dec 2003
It is not often you come across a book of poetry you want to put in the pocket of whatever coat you are wearing and carry around with you, but The Brink has to be one of those books. Its contents seem both familiar and strange, inventively modern and unassumingly traditional, powerfully alloyed.
The subject matters of the home, the family, and nature, are re-evaluated and re-dressed in a way you never suspected was possible but can fully appreciate as it occurs. The ordinary is often extraordinarily seen, considered, and presented by the poet - a crow is reincarnated as Cain's murderous gloves, and a father, aware that his life is changing, suddenly feels compelled to use his diaries for kindling in his daily ritual of lighting the fire. Dually, unimaginable concepts, like the drowning of Britain by floods and the exploration of its new underwater geography, are portrayed casually and convincingly. The language of the book seems to possess a peculiar northern austerity and a minimalism, describing the relics of human existence and the basic anatomy of the environment - the extreme edges of things - but it also has vivid blood, it's muscular and original and frequently it 'sings' to you, so that each structure of words is charged with energy and fleshed into life, whereupon it captivates you with its voice. History is borrowed and continues on. The past is unearthed and made relevent and fascinating. In his poem 'Salvage' the poet describes a house built from ship's timber, still haunted by the spirit of that first maritime identity. There is an inescapable sense throughout the collection that Jacob Polley is capable of some kind of radical archeology and animation. And the site for this work is a remarkable territory where both poetry-lovers and those unaccustomed to or even afraid of the medium can meet with satisfaction.
This is a beautiful book, a slender volume, the perfect size to keep on your person after it has been discovered. But once it has been read you will wonder just how it fits so neatly inside that pocket exactly, because the words are colossal and vital and they resonate long after the pages have been closed. Find it, buy it, carry it around.
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6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Have no doubts, this is the real deal, 12 Jan 2004
By A Customer
Thank goodness for a debut poetry collection that isn't trying to prove itself so desperately that it's leaking clever-cleverness from every seam. The Brink is a small but nigh-perfectly formed group of deceptively quiet poems that have that all-important power to linger in the mind long after reading.
There are pieces you might call 'nature poems', for want of a better description, but in Jacob Polley's world, nature is no passive backdrop or two-dimensional prettification: it's a living, breathing, awkward, stealthy presence which constantly threatens to tip into the human world in a distinctly un-natural way. Again and again the inanimate becomes dynamic, even anthropomorphized: In 'Salvage' a house becomes a skeleton; in 'The Boast' snow 'crushes', 'buries', and 'blasts' everything it touches. And in 'The Snag', a tender love poem, nature is left stuttering and stalling in the wake of a person even more impressive.
'Declaration' is a fantastic poem that somehow seems written by a much older poet - wise, assured, dealing with the big stuff in the best way, by looking at the details. 'Saturday Matinee' and 'Snow' are examples of the kind of poem which will change the way you'll see things around you forever. After reading Polley's spot-on, just-right descriptions of the experiences of sitting in a cinema waiting for a film to start, and of looking up at falling snow, I can't imagine experiencing those things without calling those words back to mind.
This kind of freshness (without the souring taint of cleverness) doesn't come around that often. Buy this book straightaway, and buy it for your friends. You won't regret it.
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