Van K. Brock
Van K. Brock is the author of The Hard Essential Landscape, The Window, Unspeakable Strangers, and other collections. He grew up in South Georgia, earned his MA, MFA and PhD at Iowa, and taught creative writing for several decades at Florida State University. He founded Sundog (now the Southeast Review), International Quarterly, and Anhinga Press. He and his wife, Flavia Maria da Silveira Lobo, divide their time between Tucson and Rio de Janeiro. Van passed away in 2017. His most recent book available from Anhinga Press is Lightered: New and Selected Poems.
LIGHTERED
BY VAN K. BROCK
$18.00. (email us for availability)
The way "pine needles speak their sibilants to the green/ pecans," Van K. Brock's LIGHTERED speaks to me. The book's title refers to highly combustible, sap-rich pine, and his poems - suffused with a strong sense of public and private history,
Dixie-haunted, world-struck - sizzle and snap on the tongue and in the mind. Brock knows how to brush just enough strangeness into our speech to make it song and to make it last. He's been to the sacred wood and brought back fire. -- R T Smith
Van K. Brock is a poet to cherish - and read! - for his sense (wisdom) and skill in bringing the secrets of our time to us without spoiling the mystery. These lightered poems give brief strong light to family tragedies, evidence of ancient, too-present crime. And there are folktunes here, much music in the words for dancing, the washing screaming to be hung "in the sun like saved sinners." -- Michael Mott
Scholarship, love of nature and family, the honoring through poetry of art, music, and travel, indignant witnessing to history's evil absurdities - these and many other passions assure the power of Brock's chromatics. He hears even the shards of mosaics as songs that awaken epiphanies, and there's grief in his poems that we are too often fragmentary man, with some parts - perhaps the most essential for our humanity - unfinished. I've followed his work for years. I value this up-to-date definitive collection. -- David Ray
UNSPEAKABLE STRANGERS: DESCENTS INTO THE DARK SELF, ASCENT INTO THE LIGHT
BY VAN K. BROCK
$10.00
These are very bold and powerful poems about [of course] practically the most difficult theme in the world. I read them with increasing admiration for both [the] mastery of imagery and control. Never once [do they] slip into the sentimental and that in itself is an achievement. But mainly I am impressed by the pervasive music, the requiem sound. -- William Styron
Poems from Lightered
These Words
The words I had for you were small
presents saying light things, and I had
filled them with my breath, like a bouquet
of balloons. Then, I thought they might
float off unless I tied them to you
or pressed them firmly into your grasp.
So I stayed up all night making them
into inflatable lifeboats. I know you know
they are too small to ride. Also,
they often crash although they sail up
rivers we have only dreamed, and even
disappear, with their secret cargoes,
into those distant interiors where
you may find one ripped open on a sharp
day, addressed to where you are, these
words, strewn among wave-smoothed pebbles,
but the cargo still there. Rare coins?
No. Only little phones that keep ringing
until you answer and the operator says,
"A person-to-person call: will you
accept the charges?" And I will say, "No,
Operator, it‘s person-to-person only.
The toll is paid." And to you: "The coins
are in you, not in those boats I made.
When you look inside, you will see.
The flipside is a map whose face is yours."