The River and the Train: Poetry - Softcover

Brock, Edwin

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811207234 ISBN 13: 9780811207232

Publisher: New Directions, 1979

Synopsis

With The River and the Train, Edwin Brock’s sixth collection to be published by New Directions, this British author shifts his focus from the brutality and desperate compromise of urban existence to the more pastoral though no less complex irony of life in a converted East Anglian granary. The bitter anger of such earlier books as The Blocked Heart (1976) and the prose and verse “Fragments of a Childhood” Here. Now. Always. (1977) has not disappeared but has been dispersed and mellowed by the poet’s life with his second wife, artist Elizabeth Brock, and their daughter “Fred.” Wistful, sardonic, Brock now fantasizes “not reincarnation/so much as sometime-loop/which returns me to/where I started to go wrong.”

About this title

About the Author

Edwin Brock (1927-1997) was a British poet. Born into a working class London family, Brock discovered poetry when he picked up an anthology during idle time while serving in World War II. He taught himself how to write verse and spent many years writing while working as a policeman and, later, a successful advertising copywriter. Two of his best-known poems are Five Ways to Kill a Man and Song of the Battery Hen.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811207234
• ISBN 13: 9780811207232
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 63