Two Poems:
"And Day Brought Back My Night"
"Snake Man"
from Geoffrey Brock's
Weighing Light

Geoffrey Brock:

Geoffrey Brock's poems have appeared in the Hudson Review, Poetry, PN Review, New England Review, and 32 Poems, as well as in several anthologies. He has held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Disaffections, his translation of Cesare Pavese's poetry, was named one of the "Best Books of 2003" by the Los Angeles Times and received both the PEN Center U.S.A. Translation Award and the MLA'S Lois Roth Translation Award. He has also translated books by Roberto Calasso and Umberto Eco. Mr. Brock earned an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is now on the faculty of the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas. His website is www.geoffreybrock.com. (Photo by Tom Kealey)

About Weighing Light:

New Criterion Poetry Prize

From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Geoffrey Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. His acute observations of landscape and of the smallest gestures that pass between people give rise to affecting human dramas both stark and deeply felt. Once read, his keen perceptions – all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form – will be long remembered.

Weighing Light is the fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. The New Criterion is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry with a regard for traditional meter and form. The magazine was thus an early leader in that poetic renaissance that has come to be called the New Formalism. Building upon its commitment to serious poetry, The New Criterion in 2000 established this annual prize.

"Geoffrey Brock's poems are delightful in ways which are all too rare nowadays. I am grateful for their freshness of attack, the play and interplay of their words, and their speaking voice, which talks so often in the key of rueful comedy."
— Richard Wilbur

"I admire Weighing Light intensely. Irony without bitterness, observations of startling freshness and exactitude, the homeliness of life caught in the quick, a cool heat, a chaste and tightly wrought architecture of sound: Geoffrey Brock has compressed all these virtues into his poems. They may weigh light, but they strike hard."
— Rosanna Warren

Search Poetry Daily / Amazon.com for other books: