Weighing Light: Poems (Hardcover)

by Geoffrey Brock (Author) "It's coitus interruptus with the sweaty world..." (more)

Editorial Reviews

Review
"Brock's poems are delightful in ways which are all too rare nowadays." -- Richard Wilbur

"I admire Weighing Light intensely...[Geoffrey Brock’s poems] may weight 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

Brock’s understated fluency in investing ordinary moments with ‘alchemic light’ makes comparison to Larkin inevitable. -- David C. Ward in PN Review

I suggest you purchase Weighing Light. -- Amylou Wilson, Northwest Arkansas Times

Superb collection. -- Literary Review

Product Description
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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 88 pages
• Publisher: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher (November 25, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1566636671
• ISBN-13: 978-1566636674
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #927,484 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A tang of the greats, February 1, 2006

By	Daniel Brown - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I read a fair amount of contemporary poetry-nothing like comprehensively, but I do try to keep up, especially with "formal" (rhymed and/or metered) work. While there's no shortage of talent tilling this field, the poems of even the best younger formalists almost always strike me as markedly below the level of the best (to me) formalists of earlier but still modern times: Yeats, Frost, and Hardy preeminently, Housman and Larkin behind by a nose (due to a lack of size, in a couple of senses, more than quality), Wilbur and Heaney reaching this level in spots (as, perhaps less frequently still, do Ransom, Millay, Lowell, Berryman, Merrill...). Several things set these figures above and apart for me: an ability to find or invent memorably resonant subjects, a play of speech rhythms-what Frost called "sentence sounds"-across the meter, and a knack for closing a poem with a line that literally punches (or, in Yeat's figure, "clicks" shut like a jewelry box).

I've just encountered a new book of poems that seems to me to be graced with all three of these virtues: an unusually worthy prize-winner called "Weighing Light," by Geoffrey Brock. A number of poems in the book have, for me, the all-too-rare tang of work by the earlier greats I love. In the sonnet "And Day Brought Back My Night," for instance, a strong premise is fully lived up to in an execution at once lucid and ingenious, leading to an ending whose timing no comedian (or executioner) could improve on:


It was so simple: you came back to me
And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter
But that. That you had gone away from me
And lived for days with him--it didn't matter.
That I had been left to care for our old dog
And house alone--couldn't have mattered less!
On all this, you and I and our happy dog
Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless.

I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys
Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work
And started in: "Item: it's years, not days.
Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn't back,
In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you
Left her, remember?" I did? I did. (I do.)


A poem called "Move" employs evocative details and vivid speech rhythms (what Frost called a voice's "posturing") to capture the complex emotional texture of a particularly universal extremity:


Try driving twenty hours in a truck,
Your life a spawl of boxes chasing you,
Only a few of them light. Add bad luck:

The radio doesn't work; the cat with whom
You share the cab decides, in hour one,
To piss in her cage (she is, we can assume,

As scared as you are): and--since these streaks run
In threes--it starts to rain. Now, with a mere
Thousand miles to go, with a vague sun

Rising and glaring through the buggy smear,
Say goodbye to those days, and praise the truck,
And praise the cat, and grip the wheel and steer.


A number of other poems in "Weighing Light" inhabit the same realm of excellence as these. A number more, though I like them a little less overall, are liberally sprinkled with indelible images and phrases. In all, an uncommon lot to love in one book. Does Geoffrey Brock continue the line of great formalists? Only time will tell, but my being moved to ask the question says something now.

6 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Seeing Everything, November 28, 2005

By	Sara Bullard - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

To see everything and then have to choose what colors, flavors, feelings, sounds and ooops, the things forgotten -- after stirring through every choice, Geoffrey Brock takes the exact words he needs and puts them in the exact order and gives back a poem that will make you bring your fist to your heart, your mouth, your eyes and finally, fling it out into the air. Ah!!! I see it, too!

If you read his poems deeply and see what he sees, you know you're in the proximity of something great and dear. There are poems you'll have to memorize, ones you'll have to call up a friend and read, and others you'll just read over and over again, for comfort. The word "indispensable" is, this time, the exact word for this book. Buy it. It's too beautiful to miss.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Smart, Open, and Honest, March 18, 2006

By	John Michael Albert "John-Michael Albert" (Dover NH) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I first came to Geoffrey Brock through Poetry Daily, when they printed "And Day Brought Back My Night." I immediately glommed onto the fact that he was a member of the modern Rhyme-and-Meter gang and doing it superbly. I, for one, cannot do it without lapsing into either satire or wannabe-Wordsworth. Not Brock (and several others, including Robert Crawford). This sonnet is so straightforward, so natural, so conversational, so unselfconsciously self-doubting, that the fact that it is an Italian sonnet, conforming to the rules of line, meter, and rhyme, yes, but also the structure of the argument, could easily wisk by without notice in a reading. I immediately sent off for the book and was not disappointed. Here is a writer who lifts the personal to the level of art and, once they're settled, makes them talk to each other openly and honestly -- like friends who once had a big fight, parted company, and have come back together for the sake of the friendship.