Weighing Light - (New Criterion) by Geoffrey Brock (Hardcover)

About the Book

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the ...

Book Synopsis

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. 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.

Review Quotes

[Geoffrey Brock and A.E. Stallings] write in traditional English metrics with a naturalness and ease, an unshowy virtuosity, which makes their poetry a pleasure to read.... Brock's [is a] haunting, original, and intellectual voice... Figurative clarity leads to troubling ambiguity, and the invitation to think is one we can't help but accept. Such is Brock's considerable skill. His voice, woven in the mesh of his verse, has an Old World authority.

Block's keen perceptions-all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language-will be long remembered.

Brock is out to grapple with the mess, not to say wreckage, of human relationships.... Weighing Light is a book of clear premises, profitably stuck to and...departed from.

Brock's understated fluency in investing ordinary moments with 'alchemic light' makes comparison to Larkin inevitable...Like Larkin, Brock actually has a sense of humour.... Humour is dangerous for a poet because many people see it as a lack of seriousness... [But] Brock is a most serious poet and one whose career, on the basis of Weighing Light, must now be followed with close attention.

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.

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.

I suggest you purchase Weighing Light.

About the Author

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.