Weighing Light: Poems

I first came to Geoffrey Brock through Poetry Daily, when they printed "And Day Brought Back My Night." I immediately glommed onto the fact that he was a member of the modern Rhyme-and-Meter gang and doing it superbly. I, for one, cannot do it without lapsing into either satire or wannabe-Wordsworth. Not Brock (and several others, including Robert Crawford). This sonnet is so straightforward, so natural, so conversational, so unselfconsciously self-doubting, that the fact that it is an Italian sonnet, conforming to the rules of line, meter, and rhyme, yes, but also the structure of the argument, could easily wisk by without notice in a reading. I immediately sent off for the book and was not disappointed. Here is a writer who lifts the personal to the level of art and, once they're settled, makes them talk to each other openly and honestly -- like friends who once had a big fight, parted company, and have come back together for the sake of the friendship.

I read a fair amount of contemporary poetry-nothing like comprehensively, but I do try to keep up, especially with "formal" (rhymed and/or metered) work. While there's no shortage of talent tilling this field, the poems of even the best younger formalists almost always strike me as markedly below the level of the best (to me) formalists of earlier but still modern times: Yeats, Frost, and Hardy preeminently, Housman and Larkin behind by a nose (due to a lack of size, in a couple of senses, more than quality), Wilbur and Heaney reaching this level in spots (as, perhaps less frequently still, do Ransom, Millay, Lowell, Berryman, Merrill...). Several things set these figures above and apart for me: an ability to find or invent memorably resonant subjects, a play of speech rhythms-what Frost called "sentence sounds"-across the meter, and a knack for closing a poem with a line that literally punches (or, in Yeat's figure, "clicks" shut like a jewelry box). I've just encountered a new book of poems that seems to me to be graced with all three of these virtues: an unusually worthy prize-winner called "Weighing Light," by Geoffrey Brock. A number of poems in the book have, for me, the all-too-rare tang of work by the earlier greats I love. In the sonnet "And Day Brought Back My Night," for instance, a strong premise is fully lived up to in an execution at once lucid and ingenious, leading to an ending whose timing no comedian (or executioner) could improve on: It was so simple: you came back to me And I was happy. Nothing seemed to matter But that. That you had gone away from me And lived for days with him--it didn't matter. That I had been left to care for our old dog And house alone--couldn't have mattered less! On all this, you and I and our happy dog Agreed. We slept. The world was worriless. I woke in the morning, brimming with old joys Till the fact-checker showed up, late, for work And started in: "Item: it's years, not days. Item: you had no dog. Item: she isn't back, In fact, she just remarried. And oh yes, item: you Left her, remember?" I did? I did. (I do.) A poem called "Move" employs evocative details and vivid speech rhythms (what Frost called a voice's "posturing") to capture the complex emotional texture of a particularly universal extremity: Try driving twenty hours in a truck, Your life a spawl of boxes chasing you, Only a few of them light. Add bad luck: The radio doesn't work; the cat with whom You share the cab decides, in hour one, To piss in her cage (she is, we can assume, As scared as you are): and--since these streaks run In threes--it starts to rain. Now, with a mere Thousand miles to go, with a vague sun Rising and glaring through the buggy smear, Say goodbye to those days, and praise the truck, And praise the cat, and grip the wheel and steer. A number of other poems in "Weighing Light" inhabit the same realm of excellence as these. A number more, though I like them a little less overall, are liberally sprinkled

To see everything and then have to choose what colors, flavors, feelings, sounds and ooops, the things forgotten -- after stirring through every choice, Geoffrey Brock takes the exact words he needs and puts them in the exact order and gives back a poem that will make you bring your fist to your heart, your mouth, your eyes and finally, fling it out into the air. Ah!!! I see it, too! If you read his poems deeply and see what he sees, you know you're in the proximity of something great and dear. There are poems you'll have to memorize, ones you'll have to call up a friend and read, and others you'll just read over and over again, for comfort. The word "indispensable" is, this time, the exact word for this book. Buy it. It's too beautiful to miss.