Can we separate our personal experiences from the world we live in? Fred Pollack has wrestled with this question. In his work, individuals exist firmly in the context of their historical moment. The self and its depths don’t orbit reality but reflect it, and it reflects them; the task of imagination is to capture that shared light. This book will take you on many journeys. Pollack writes about people and societies across time and space. You will meet characters both real and fantastical, in the present, past, and future. They are always navigating relationships, some loving, some inspiring; often with forces that have, or claim to have, power over them. The subject-matter of The Beautiful Losses ranges from the hopes of an eight-year-old scientist (“And So You Shall”) to Biden’s infrastructure plan (“Infrastructure”). There are fantasies set in the poet’s DC neighborhood (“Events of Today”), in the Middle Ages (“The Bells”), and among alien civilizations (“Entanglement”). Pollack imagines the imaginative lives of others (“Friends”), sometimes their real lives (“Darlin’ you just sorta”); often, as in the title poem, a near or distant future. According to Pollack, “A strong poem is about something that is important, but which is not perceived by the ideologies of its time or expressible in their language.” Most of these poems combine lyric and narrative elements. They read like stories. Pollack says his secret ambition is – without sacrificing compression, symbolism, or subtlety – to reclaim territory that poetry ceded long ago to the novel. In his introduction to Pollack’s early book-length poem Happiness, Mark Jarman wrote: “(Pollack) shows us the life, both real and ideal, of our era, the gods we worship, our customs and traditions, our folkways and social norms, our dreams and nightmares, all in a voice and rhythm that are as much of our time as Homer’s were of his.”
