Brock, Geoffrey: After

Paul Dry Books, paperbackPublication Date: April 9, 2024Publisher 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 fa