Sailing to Babylon

Sailing to Babylon, James Pollock's debut collection, is filled with poems of exploration and discovery: a schoolboy's fascination with his teacher; a Bible inherited from a grandmother; an extended Dantean hike in terza rima. Pollock muses, too, on figures from Canadian history--explorers Henry Hudson, David Thompson, and John Franklin, the critic Northrop Frye, the pianist Glenn Gould. This is a collection full of surprises and pleasures, a treasure-chest mapped for discovery, "an image of the world/ made small enough to hold inside the mind." A book with the power to take you "to the place/ exactly where you always meant to go."
Finalist for the 2013 Griffin Poetry PrizeFinalist for the 2012 Governor General's Literary Award in PoetryRunner-Up for the 2013 Posner Poetry Book AwardWinner of a 2013 Outstanding Achievement Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Library Association.PRAISE FOR SAILING TO BABYLON:"The sentence, in James Pollock's remarkably assured debut volume, is a unit of music and of time, a carefully modulated choreography that moves the reader through an elegantly constructed set of meditations on place and history and the education of the self . . . . Quietly confident, formally adept, assured in their music, these artful lyrics are not only an accomplishment in themselves but promise to register, as the poet says, 'the breaking changes of a life to come'." - Mark Doty, Judge's Citation, Griffin Poetry Prize shortlist