After

＂Among the finest poets of his generation.＂
--Richard Wilbur, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

＂Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight.＂
--Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

The 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.

Geoffrey
Brock is the author of two collections of poems, 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, Copper Nickel, Yale Review, and Best American Poetry, and
he has translated authors including Umberto Eco, Roberto Calasso, Italo
Calvino, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Giovanni Pascoli, Patrizia Cavalli, and Cesare Pavese.
His awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Cullman
Center for Scholars and Writers, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the
Academy of American Poets. His translations have received ALTA’s National
Translation Award for Poetry, the Raiziss/de Palchi Book Prize, the MLA’s Lois
Roth Award, the PEN Center USA Translation Prize, the ATA’s Lewis
Galantière Translation Award, and Poetry magazine’s John Frederick Nims
Prize. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Florida and a PhD in
Comparative Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. Since 2006 he has
taught in the University of Arkansas’s Program in Creative Writing &
Translation, where he is a Distinguished Professor of English and the founding
editor of The Arkansas International. He currently divides his time
between Arkansas and Montreal.