“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 prevail

even in the midst of death; how we forget,
and how our forgetting makes us homeless,
until we dig ourselves out of this debt

we owe the giant past for making us
ourselves.