After

Angebote / Angebote:

Among the finest poets of his generation."--Richard Wilbur"Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight."--Boris DralyukAfter, thetitle of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, is meant to work in twoways. A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the deathof Brock's father who was also a poet. Manyof the others are also in some way "after"--asin, 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 ofmiddle composition between translation and original design." Brockhas been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities have proceededalong parallel but clearly separate tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middleground where the two tracks approach each other, as if nearing some horizon, creating a conversational space. It's aspace that complicates our derivative, Romantic notions of originality, whichGoethe famously challenged: Peoplealways 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 forall I owe to great predecessors and contemporaries, little would remain. All poets, Goethe suggests, are inescapablyindebted 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 andpoetic debts and inheritances.