Soul Keeping Company

Lucie Brock-Broido is the author of three collections of poetry, A Hunger, The Master Letters and Trouble in Mind (all published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York). In 2008 she published Letters to a Stranger: The Collected Poems of Thomas James with Graywolf Press in the US. She is Director of Poetry in the School of the Arts at Columbia University and has taught previously at Harvard University, the Bennington Writing Seminars and Princeton University. She has been the recipient of awards from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City and in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As America and Canada became more diverse and adventurous, as their poets engaged with intimate, risky subject matter and searching re-explorations of language, myth and the poetic process, many British poets and critics were moving in the opposite direction, with a growing emphasis on received forms and safe ideas laced with a little self-deprecating irony that led publishers to believe that there was "no market" in the UK for North American verse. Allison Funk, Linda Gregerson, Rodney Jones, Charles Wright, Robert Wrigley, spring to mind to name just a few - and it has been hard to shake off the notion that this situation is a result, not so much of chance or economics, as conservatism.There is, however, some evidence to suggest that this is changing. In June this year, Carcanet published Soul Keeping Company, a long overdue selection of Lucie Brock-Broido's astonishing and extraordinarily powerful work. Brock-Broido has been described as an 'elliptical' poet, which may or may not be helpful; in reviews, the word that crops up most frequently is 'gorgeous', but what matters most is that this poet, more than any other I can think of, constantly renews our sense of the possibilities of the language we use, not just in our conversations with others, but in the inner dialogues that accompany love, loss, betrayal, self-revelation and grief. Brock-Broido's marriages of the abstract and the concrete, and of the wild and the familiar, not only make things strange (to borrow Seamus Heaney's famous dictum) but also create a sense that this strangeness is more like home than the sorry approximations that convention allows:In the space between seasonsWhich is one night in a life,The corn beats inside its stalks, waiting for bloom.The wheat flowers, falls easily.The clouds become enormous & have names.There is no other poet, working anywhere, who does what Brock-Broido does and Carcanet performs what is, quite simply, a public service in making her work available to us....

• from A Hunger (1988)Domestic MysticismBirdie AfricaEvolutionReal LifeAutobiographyOctober Seventh, Nineteen Eighty-ThreeThe Future as a CowEdward VI on the Seventh DayJessica, from the WellHitchcock BlueKid FlashHeartbeatDanse MacabreWhat the Whales Sound Like in ManhattanThe Beginning of the BeginningIn a Landlocked TimeLucie & Her SistersElective MutesI Wish You LoveTen Years Apprenticeship in FantasyAnd So Long, I’ve Had You FameAfter the Grand Perhapsfrom The Master Letters (1995)A Preamble to The Master LettersCarrowmoreAlso, None Among Us Has Seen GodRome BeautyUnholyA Brief History of AsylumThe Supernatural Is Only the Natural, DisclosedObsession, CompulsionCarnivorousTo a Strange Fashion of ForsakingDid Not Come BackAnd You Know That I Know Milord That You KnowThe October HorseGratitudeDull WeatherFrom the ProsceniumRadiating NaïvetéFair Copy from a Fair WorldHis ApprenticeYou Can’t Always Get What You WantPursuit of HappinessA Glooming Peace This Morning with It BringsHousekeepingHaute Couture VulgarityToxic GumboIn the Attitude Desired for ExhibitionLike Murder for Small Hay in the UnderworldEverybody Has a Heart, Except Some PeopleMoving On in the Dark Like Loaded Boats at Night, Though There Is No Course, There Is BoundlessnessYour Cromwell, Your Thomas MoreI Dont Know Who It Is, That Sings, nor Did I, Would I TellGrimoireWorkThe Last Passenger Pigeon in the Cincinnati ZooEverything Husk to the WillThe Interrupted LifeHow Can It Be I Am No Longer IThe Sleeping Hollow of His Face Will Be the Straight Passof SurrenderingAm Moorfrom Trouble in Mind (2004)The Halo That Would Not LightAfter RaphaelLeaflet on WooingStill Life with AspirinHerculaneumThe One Theme of Which Everything Else Is a VariationPeriodic Table of Ethereal ElementsSome Details of HellBasic Poem in a Basic TongueDeath as a German ExpertGamineMorgue Near HeavenThe InsignificantsA Lion in WinterBoy at the Border of His Own AllegoryStill Life with Feral HorseSoul Keeping CompanySelf-Portrait with Her Hair on FireThe DeerhuntingDarwinism as SpiteLady with an ErmineFragment on DissemblingThe Halo That Lit TwiceSelf-Portrait as Kaspar HauserSelf-Portrait with Self-PityGirl at the Border of Her Own AllegoryOf the Finished WorldIn ElsinoreSpainPortrait of Lucy with Fine Nile JarThe Identity of the BridegroomSelf-Portrait as a Herd of OnePhysicismSelf-Portrait with Her Hair Cut OffThe One Thousand DaysDire WolfPamphlet on RaveningSelf-Deliverance by LionNotes on the PoemsIndex of TitlesIndex of First Lines