The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Geoffrey Brock's Weighing Light. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. His acute observations of landscape and of the smallest gestures that pass between people give rise to affecting human dramas both stark and deeply felt. Once read, his keen perceptions—all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form—will be long remembered.
Geoffrey Brock's poems have appeared in the Hudson Review, Poetry, PN Review, New England Review, and 32 Poems, as well as in several anthologies. He has held a Wallace Stegner Fellowship, an NEA Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Disaffections, his translation of Cesare Pavese's poetry, was named one of the "Best Books of 2003" by the Los Angeles Times and received both the PEN Center U.S.A. Translation Award and the MLA's Lois Roth Translation Award. He has also translated books by Roberto Calasso and Umberto Eco. Mr. Brock earned an M.F.A. from the University of Florida and a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is now on the faculty of the Programs in Creative Writing and Translation at the University of Arkansas. His website is www.geoffreybrock.com.
What People are Saying About This
Rosanna Warren
"I admire Weighing Light intensely...[Geoffrey Brock's poems] may weight light, but they strike hard."
Richard Wilbur
"Brock's poems are delightful in ways which are all too rare nowadays."
