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Overview
—Richard Wilbur, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
"Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight.”
—Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems
The title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. Many of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. And many are in some way “after”—as in, in the manner of—other poems or works of art. Such texts, often called “versions” or “imitations,” have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson’s words, “a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.”
Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but distinct tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it's a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets owe debts to other poets as surely as each of us does to those who raised us, and After is a partial account of such personal and poetic inheritances.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781589881877 |
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Publisher: | Dry, Paul Books, Incorporated |
Publication date: | 04/09/2024 |
Pages: | 82 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
"The Day"
It hangs on its
stem like a plum
at the edge of a
darkening thicket.
It’s swelling and
blushing and ripe
and I reach out a
hand to pick it
but flesh moves
slow through time
and evening
comes on fast
and just when I
think my fingers
might seize that
sweetness at last
the gentlest of
breezes rises
and the plum lets
go of the stem.
And now it’s my
fingers ripening
and evening that’s
reaching for them.
"Gray Communion"
I still have conversations with my father.
Sometimes we’re at the bottom of the ocean
and he’s distracted by the lack of air.
It’s hard to stay on topic when you’re busy
turning the water into oxygen,
or trying to. It’s also hard down there
to hear with any clarity. It’s easy
if not quite fair to blame it on the weather.
Sometimes he’s standing at a teller’s window
with me on his shoulders. Some egregious fault
of hers has made him livid. He wants to close
all his accounts—he claims that he has many.
There is no oxygen inside the vault,
I whisper to him. What I mean is money.
Wounded, he shrinks beneath me. Says he knows.
But says the teller looks like his ex-widow.
Sometimes we’re in his dirty living room
watching the Spurs, speaking chiefly in stats.
(He moved to San Antonio for a woman
who saved him, for a year or so. I have here
his gray communion document, which states
whoever eats this bread will live forever.
I can’t imagine a more awful omen.
Naturally she and God lost faith in him;
he never spoke of it, but so I gather.)
Last night we dined on a terrace by a lake.
His breathing tubes kept slipping toward his mouth,
hindering meal and colloquy alike.
He tore them off and flung them down the stairs.
After supper, we argued over stars,
both of us smoking again, as in our youth.
I still have conversations with my father.
"Defaced"
after Rilke
The head we cannot know,
nor its bright fruit, the eyes.
And yet the body has
its gaze: a lamp turned low.
Or else the breast would cease
to dazzle, the hips fail
to curve into that smile
that begets more than a kiss.
And flesh would lose all life,
not flare till there’s no blind
it can’t see you behind—
you, who must change your life.