Edwin Brock – författare

Cynics, says our author, “write books / by Edwin Brock / illustrated by / his wife.” Readers already familiar with the wry, sometimes dour work of the British poet Edwin Brock will recall that his wife, Elizabeth, contributed the jacket illustrations to his two previous collections published here (Invisibility Is the Art of Survival and The Portraits The Poses). Now they have combined their talents and complementary satiric visions to produce “A Guide to the Isms.” With the biting verse of the one, and the charming, mischievous sketches of the other, Paroxisms prods some of our most cherished sets of ideas. Catholicism, Freudianism, Patriotism, Communism, Capitalism, Surrealism, Eroticism, even the poet’s own Cynicism––all are at the receiving end of the Brocks’ combined sting.

The Blocked Heart is the fourth collection by the British poet Edwin Brock to be published in the United States. Reading his most recent verse, one becomes increasingly aware that the author’s pervasive wry melancholy is not so much a passive response to the stress of urban life as a compassionate, virile outburst against it. Here we find, in many ways, a maturing synthesis of his earlier work: the candid, often bitter introspection of Invisibility Is the Art of Survival (1972 ), the more meditative, though no less incisive subtlety of The Portraits The Poses (1973), and the acerbic satire of Paroxisms (1974), a volume which includes illustrations by the poet’s wife, Elizabeth. “[His is] the freshest voice from Britain in years,” writes Hayden Carruth. ’’Brock’s sense of the formal tradition is indubitably English, but otherwise unpredictable, because he uses it very personally, amiably, and with great natural tact. His poems look to me like a breakthrough.”