Nearly Florida

by James Brock

Book Overview

Poetry. A quiet lyric grace informs the poems of James Brock, a grace which never fails to console and locate their speaker, even in the midst of his restless odyssey among many American landscapes. The poems speak with a subtle necessity and authority, both as they confront the bagaries of daily living and as they perform their more demanding investigation into the meaning of loss. These are poems that understand, as one of his lines puts it, 'the...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0938078674
• ISBN13: 9780938078678
• Release Date: January 2000
• Publisher: Anhinga Press
• Length: 86 Pages

Customer Reviews

The same excellent poems in his online chapbooks.

Not to discourage anyone from supporting a talented poet, but if you have read his online work and purchase this in hopes of seeing something new, you will be disappointed. The very few new poems are not nearly as outstanding. If you can't afford to throw your money around, I highly recommend spending it on his previous work, The Sunshine Mine Disaster. Check this out even if you don't think it sounds interesting. I especially recommend Brock to timid readers who are not enamored of poetry. His work really does have something for everyone.

Brilliant

Lyrical, suggestive poetry, handsomely arrayed, that stands up reading after reading. These poems, about love, place, and loss, prove redemptive and hopeful and honest, as when the speaker arises with his beloved to a desert landscape of "automobiles and asphalt and ash," or when the speaker marvels at the airiness and gravity of his lover's dance, "the raw doomed pull of the music," or when the speaker sees the formation of his son's image: "my child's face in a cry or a laugh, / calling out someone else's name." These poems, like all good poetry, risks sentimentality, but they have a rigor and intelligence to them that make the poetry rise.While the poems are personal, they exhibit the dexterity and depth of a craftsman who is in full control of his art. They rise above the rather facile and fashionable criticism about the personal lyric these days. In short, a grown-up has written these poems.