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by Geoffrey Brock (Author)
"Among the finest poets of his generation."
--Richard Wilbur, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
--Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other PoemsThe title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. Many of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. And many are in some way "after"--as in, in the manner of--other poems or works of art. Such texts, often called "versions" or "imitations," 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, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but distinct tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it's a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets owe debts to other poets as surely as each of us does to those who raised us, and After is a partial account of such personal and poetic inheritances.
Author Biography
Geoffrey Brock is an American poet and translator. He is the author of two previous collections, Weighing Light and Voices Bright Flags; the editor of The FSG Book of Twentieth-Century Italian Poetry; and the translator of various books of poetry, prose, and comics, mostly from Italian. His poems have appeared in journals including Poetry magazine, Paris Review, Yale Review, and Best American Poetry, and he has translated authors including Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, and Italo Calvino. His translations have received ALTA's National Translation Award for Poetry and the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, among others. Brock is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Arkansas and the founding editor of the Arkansas International.
