David Pollard was born under a hospital bed during the blitz in 1942 and brought up a Londoner. After working in the furniture trade and serving his articles for accountancy, he fled to the University of Sussex where he was given his three degrees in literature, the history of ideas and philosophy. The last of these, a doctorate, awarded on his 40th birthday, was published as The Poetry of Keats: Language and Experience.

He worked at the University of Essex and Sussex and pesnt a year at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem as a Lady Davies Scholar. He also published the KWIC Concordance to the Harvard Edition of Keats' Letters as well as other work on Keats, Blake and Nietzsche. His latest, Nietzsche's Footfalls, is a meditation on the philosopher and his times and came out in 2003.

He has also reviewed extensively in the fields of both philosophy and literature. Apart from a Waterloo Sampler, this is Pollard's first book of poetry although his work has appeared in: Omphalos, Tears in the Fence, Aletheia, Fire, Eratica, Eclipse and Poetry Monthly. He is currently writing a comparison of Blake and Nietzsche and his holiday task is a historical novel, The Memories of Herod Agrippa II.

ISBN 1-902731-31-X
£7.00

This is poetry at the margins, even beyond the margins; an extraordinary debut by a late starter. Intense and compact certainly, but taking pains to follow Oppen's dictum "I have not and never did have and motive of poetry / But to achieve clarity". Shades hover around these margins: Oppen of course, Celan, Blanchot, Mallarmé, Neruda.

Here is poetry influenced by modern European thought and fuelled by ontological insights. The result is a series of initimate meditations on the intrinsic failure at the heart of creative writing denying the source which fathers it.

It ends with a profound series on the death of his father and of all fathers. This is poetry pared down to its essential core but still lyrical and obsesses with the music of the language.

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 Waterloo Samplers No. 4 (2004)

ISBN 1-902731-16-6
£3.00

Pollard's intensive, ontological meditations on loss, 'the death of God', creativity and the failure of writing, are quite wonderful and wholly unexpected. His previous books are a Heideggerian reading of Keats, and Nietzsche's Footfalls. He's currently writing on epistemology. Se we end up with a professional philospher who lectures in English, was taught by Sidney Keyes's teacher, and only began writing again when Keyes's influences was long behind him... A pretty heady late flowering - there's nobody remotely like him.
Simon Jenner

To read extracts please click here