Edwin Brock – författare

Invisibility Is the Art of Survival marks the first appearance in this country, in book form, of the work of Edwin Brock. Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet found.” Thus in addition to being poetry editor of Ambit, Brock has published several volumes of his own. His first, An Attempt at Exorcism, was brought out in 1959, and was followed over the next decade by A Family Affair, With Love from Judas, a large selection in Penguin Modern Poets 8, and A Cold Day at the Zoo. For Invisibility Is the Art of Survival, Brock has gleaned a representative selection from all his previous books, adding to it a number of recent, uncollected poems. Confronted with his work, American readers will agree with the critic Alan Pryce-Jones that Brock has written “some of the most observant and compassionate poems of our time––poems, moreover, in which the poet keeps his feet on the ground as skillfully as his head in the air.”

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.”

The publication in 1972 of Invisibility Is the Art of Survival, the author’s own selection of poems from earlier books brought out in England, introduced Edwin Brock to American readers. This new collection, The Portraits & The Poses, will further the acquaintance with a fresh and forceful voice, one which David Ignatow has called “the best in English contemporary poetry.” These are highly personal poems: the “poses,” the postures and bafflements of everyday life as Brock sees it; the “portraits,” pithy vignettes of everyday people and their relationships as he knows them. Yet what is personal to the poet is made highly accessible by his art, and by his particular qualities of profound earthiness, honesty, humor, and concern.