“Quarry Park” by James Pollock
From Michael Lista’s 2012 piece in the National Post.
In “Quarry Park,” Pollock is a new Dante, navigating a dark wood in the middle of life, but Virgil, his guide, is recast as Pollock’s own young son; throughout the poem the erudite Pollock is always trailing behind his young master, belatedly aestheticizing what his 2½-year-old son can appreciate viscerally — an abandoned campsite, climbing trees, ants farming and eating aphids, and yes, a cardinal’s song. The enduring beauty of “Quarry Park,” and of Sailing to Babylon as a whole, is in the way both young seekers find renewal in what preceded them and endures:
it all fills
me with such longing, for God knows how frail
our lives and their monuments are, and yet
how beautiful the ruins that prevaileven in the midst of death; how we forget,
and how our forgetting makes us homeless,
until we dig ourselves out of this debtwe owe the giant past for making us
ourselves.