Brock, Geoffrey: After

Paul Dry Books, paperback

Publication Date: April 9, 2024

Publisher Marketing: AFTER, the title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, is meant to work in two ways. A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father who was also a poet. Many of the others are also in some way "after"--as in, in the manner of--other poems or works of art. Such texts are often called "imitations" and have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson's words, "a kind of middle composition between translation and original design." Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years now, and for most of his career those two activities have proceeded along parallel but clearly separate tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle ground where the two tracks approach each other, as if nearing some horizon, creating a conversational space. It's a space that complicates our derivative, Romantic notions of originality, which Goethe famously challenged: People always talk about originality, but what does it mean! As soon as we're born, the world starts acting on us, and keeps on to the end ... If I could account for all I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, little would remain. All poets, Goethe suggests, are inescapably indebted to other poets, much as each of us is indebted to those who raised us. The poems in AFTER are attempts to account for personal and poetic debts and inheritances.