Geoffrey Brock

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About Weighing Light

Winner of the 2004 New Criterion Poetry Prize, judged by A.E. Stallings, Charles Martin, and David Yezzi. Published in 2005 by Ivan R. Dee.

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“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

“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.” —PN Review

“A superb book.” —The Literary Review

“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

“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

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