Edwin Brock - Titles

Titles

Brock has authored over a dozen poetry collections, a novel and an autobiography.

Brock wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, Five Ways to Kill a Man and Song of the Battery Hen, but his work deserves wider recognition beyond these anthology favourites.

Brock's poems amply demonstrate the virtues of his "intensely felt, supple, direct and memorable work." Five Ways to Kill a Man is chilling in its deliberately emotionless tone as it uses the language of a practical manual to explore humanity's cruelty. Progress is reduced to the way in which mankind has "improved" its methods of killing. Inspired by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and written quickly, the poem has an air of authority which Brock's reading emphasises. Song of the Battery Hen is similarly suited to being spoken aloud. Though written as a dramatic monologue, in his introduction Brock makes it clear the poem has autobiographical resonance. As such it is a good example of his belief that "most activity is an attempt to define oneself in one way or another: for me poetry, and only poetry, has provided this self-defining act.".

• An Attempt at Exorcism (poetry collection, 1959)
• The Little White God (novel, 1962)
• Here, Now, Always (autobiography, 1977)
• Five Ways To Kill A Man (poetry collection, 1997)