Biography
David Pollard was born under the bed in 1942 and has been furniture salesman, accountant, TEFL teacher and university lecturer. He got his three degrees from the University of Sussex and has since taught at the universities of Sussex, Essex and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He has published The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience which was his doctoral thesis, 'A KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition of Keats’ Letters', a novel, 'Nietzsche’s Footfall's, and four volumes of poetry, 'patricides', 'Risk of Skin', 'bedbound' and 'Self-Portrait's. He has also been published in other volumes and in learned journals and poetry magazines.
Samples
Robespierre They shot him in the mouth (this orator whose voice was like a piping boy’s but choired into the rhetoric of the hot hand of blood) and left him on the table of his stern committee to parse the broken night away. O so good and o so true and diligent of so much hope to save the revolution from its friends - terror and virtue twinned to wield their zeal - green-tinted eyeing, culotted sans-culotte, antimonarchical yet supreme being, waiting for immolation and martyrdom to him and his like a poised wave ready in its forward roll to heave its certainty against the waters of its own destruction. Sanson ripped off the paper holding his jaw together, laid him on his back to eye the razor scything downward, to grant the sudden falling blade the only freedom that could stop his screaming. God’s judgement maybe came inter gladium et jugulum, finally granting him the mercy and the common grave he had silenced so many into. Confession . . . I gave their tender voices Into the blue expanse. [William Blake] 1. Evening, North-West - the wind above the surf just as you told it. Below, the moon, pregnant with its loss, leeches its pale towards the wave’s wide height and wind embrace her, a puppet of limp bones cradled and rocking, gently whelmed by waters of confession - tender voice of songs - into her own transparent grail. 2. Evening, North-West - repose is in the blind and virid beryl of her eyes, peeled from the soul’s skin, tender, sees no stars. How can a mortal singer pray such sound once stricken by the humming bird of love and that sweet warp of honey sucked and held? It is too orphic for our own repose - or hers or hers - - yet these blown surfaces must still express it nonetheless while far below the fathoms of the sea are jarring cruel. 3. Evening, North-West - the planets turn and fall and all the streams of all our rimes disgorge here on this broken promontory, its pebbles gleaming rancid true with all the weight of so much land behind. You tolled us once that it would come to this. 4. Evening, North-West - horizons unable now to turn again. And thus and thus great sea and loss unbound - the accents of your drowning colours teach us how we may better pitch the voices of our broken tents.
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