Weighing Light

Poems

Geoffrey Brock author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Ivan R Dee, Inc

Published:1st Sep '05

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Weighing Light cover

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Geoffrey Brock's Weighing Light. 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. 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.

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 * The 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 *

ISBN: 9781566636674

Dimensions: 220mm x 166mm x 14mm

Weight: 245g

88 pages