Weighing Light: Poems (New Criterion Series)

by Geoffrey Brock (Author), Geoffrey Brock (Author)

New
Hardcover
2005
$17.42

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.

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.

$17.42

Quantity

20+ in stock

More Information

Format: Hardcover
Pages: 108
Publisher: Ivan R. Dee
Published: 01 Sep 2005
ISBN 10: 1566636671
ISBN 13: 9781566636674

Media Reviews

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. -- David C. Ward PN Review 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. Poetry ( [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. -- Mark Jarman Hudson Review I suggest you purchase Weighing Light. -- Amylou Wilson Northwest Arkansas Times 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 Block's keen perceptions-all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language-will be long remembered. Poetry Daily

Author Bio

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.