After

"The title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, is meant to work in two ways. A number of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. Some of those and many of the others are also in some way "after"-as in, in the manner of-other poems or works of art. Such texts are often called "imitations" and 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 clearly separate 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 are indebted to other poets as surely as each of us is indebted to those who raised us, and the poems in After attempt to account for such personal and poetic inheritances"--