Product Description

While Jacob Polley's first collection, The Brink, announced a poet of great promise, few readers will be prepared for a work of the mature and slow power of Little Gods. Polley has been guided more and more by old-fashioned lyric inspiration of the sort all too rare in contemporary English poetry. In the quiet, insistent chants of his love poems and in his almost occult conjurings of time and place, Polley achieves both a directness of expression and unsentimental intimacy of address that only a poet of very considerable gifts could even attempt. Little Gods unequivocally announces Polley as one of the leading British poets of his generation.

Praise for The Brink:

'The kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent' Guardian

'A sparkling collection of crystalline poems, succinct in their observation, precise in their form' The Times

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #231115 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 80 pages

Sunday Times
'Polley's talent extends promisingly into new areas.'

TLS
'The best reason to keep reading Polley may be his ear, his gift simply for putting words next to one another.'

From the Back Cover

Picador Poetry

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While The Brink, Jacob Polley’s first collection, was widely praised for its complex music and imagistic brilliance, few readers will be prepared for the somewhat different voice that emerges from Little Gods. More and more, Polley has been guided by the sort of old-fashioned lyric inspiration that is all too rare in contemporary poetry. Through the quietly insistent chants of its love poems and almost occult conjurings of place and time, through its brave directness of speech and unsentimental intimacy of address, Little Gods builds into the kind of sheerly memorable statement only a poet of very considerable gifts could forge.

'The kind of poetry that imbues the everyday, the tarnished and burnished, with the possibilities of the transcendent' Guardian

Customer Reviews

Dirty Pastoral
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!

leaf by leaf the trees go blind
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...

Occasionally lovely, fundamentally safe
This is not a significant leap forward from The Brink, despite what the reviews are claiming. Nonetheless, Polley shows us again that he is one of the finest practitioners in the UK of faultlessly-formed pastoral poetry. He inherits from the edgier Don Paterson in this precision, as well as the equivalent Irish generation. But, as with The Brink, Little Gods owes its greatest debt to Ted Hughes. The problem with this particular inheritance is that Polley does not have the charge and power of Hughes. He continuously fails to invoke nature in a way that has the depth and magnetism which elevated Hughes to his spine-tingling best. If you like your poetry beautifully carved and comfortable, then Polley is your safest bet. But if you want the real thing, go and buy Ted Hughes' Crow, Wodwo, or Lupercal. This pales in comparison.