DAVID POLLARD

David Pollard has the poets preoccupation with the limitations of language in his compelling collection, Bird of Oblivion. He approaches the painful subject of a loved ones dementia obliquely, often using nautical metaphors to explore how it feels to be utterly powerless. This distancing technique frees him to write with unflinching honesty, taking the reader straight to the heart of suffering.The flowing, unpunctuated lines and surging rhythm mirror the energy of the sea. The darkness in this collection is illuminated by moments of grace.There is a psalm-like beauty in these lines. The speakers quest for meaning is precarious, almost breaking down in the moving elegy, Agenda Review David Pollard brings a lifetimes intellectual stringency to his work, yet never loses sight of the human heart. In Bird of Oblivion, his lyrical gifts have found a deep seam of emotion. Here are poems which hang together as if written in a single sweep. And yet each remains a quiet gem with its own story to unpack.On one level, Bird of Oblivion is a moving response to his wifes deepening dementia. But like all the best poetry, it invites different interpretations of its core theme. Loss is ultimately a journey we all travel. Though bleak, loss is not without its compensations. These poems suggest we can look for, and sometimes recover, something of the essence of what has slipped away. The collection opens with Love Poem:. . . It seems no time since we lay downinto an oblivion of times vain dawnin the ruby wound of our watchand rode the river past the tatterswe had shaken off of all the worldand sparrows were in the rosebush of your hair . . .One of the pleasures of this collection is the richness of its language: cadences that flow like rivers, sonorities that cry out for performance. And always the sea, which is "black as widows eyes", "the tide rolls with a sound like sin", "for here there is no turning,/ only the lie of the sea and the lie of the word/ and the spit of rocks just beyond the audible."And under it all, a current of Biblical and Shakespearian allusions that surface so subtely:Pollards many years as an amateur sailor weaves a nautical leitmotiv through much of the collection. Towards the end of Love Poem, the sea becomes threatening:" . . . and we ignored the coming galeand its rising roar as an alchemy of unkind metalscast all meaning out and the following windbetrayed the past and we were bloodand bone of ourselves and fleeing over the waters.and you had blackbirds on your bright tonguethat brings me comfort still.".By eschewing commas, Pollard creates a sense of inevitability, a force that cant be controlled, a breathless rush towards fate: "beyond the currents of past love/ and our failed way of telling it/ and on/ anSometimes the pain of loss is depicted visually and rhythmically in splintered phrases, as in The Day of Ashes, where the final word is literally "silence".The penultimate poem, Blackbird, my blackbird is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful sequence of twelve short pieces. Everything that makes Pollard an important poet is here. Blackbird, my blackbird with your crooked wingstruggling along the dustand cradle of our hopes:your plaintive call so godless and unkindcan reach our ears no longer . . .I as...

How strange that one of the finest books on Nietzsche should be a novel Jason Wirth (Seattle University)Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously.Nietzsches FootfallsDuring the final decade of Nietzsches life, when he was mad, his sister created an archive in his name. She placed him upstairs as a living exhibit while she beavered away in the rooms beneath rewriting his work and establishing him as a great name in the new world of Nazi Germany. Her efforts gave him a posthumous existence totally at odds with his own expressed desires.This image is at the core of the book which deals with various posthumous lives, the way in which intentions change unexpectedly in a complex interwoven set of relationships some obvious, some less so: with his sister, Elizabeth who married an anti-semitic agitator called Forster and went out to Paraguay to found an Aryan colony and later, after he had committed suicide and her brother had gone mad, she returned to Germany and assiduously turned him into an icon for Nazi thinking. another with Richard Wagner who he began by loving and later rejected. Other paths also cross and recross.The book also deals with Nietzsches madness and how (madly) things change into their opposites, for example, how anti-anti-semitism can change into anti-semitism and Nazism, then into a reaction against the holocaust and then into a new kind of revisionism and denial.Even though all the information here is true, it is written as a continuous meditation - as a work of imagination. The text is continuous and includes small biographies, philosophic meditations, summaries, quotes, some history plus descriptions. or his writings in unexpected ways.The aim is to write a story of parallel posthumous existences and the way they all interrelate.

TEACH YOURSELF TURKISH is a complete course for beginners in written and spoken Turkish. It is also ideal for those wanting to brush up existing knowledge of the language and those who are studying with a teacher and are looking for supplementary material.

TEACH YOURSELF TURKISH is a complete course for beginners in written and spoken Turkish. It is also ideal for those wanting to brush up existing knowledge of the language and those who are studying with a teacher and are looking for supplementary material. There is comprehensive help with the pronunciation both in the Introduction and on the accompanying 60-minute CD.

The year 1942 began with disaster for the Allies but paved the way to victory. World War II was a conflict over land and resources but also democracy and freedom. The 1920s and 30s had seen liberal democracy losing the fight against challengers from the Left and Right. By the end of the 1930s, Hitler had destroyed the few functioning democracies in Europe, and at the end of 1941, the future looked bleak, even as the US entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbour.But the year that began in such fear ended with the Allies winning victories everywhereon land, on the sea and in the air. Discover what caused this drastic change of fortunes in the war and its long-term consequences.