About this Book

The way pine needles speak their sibilants to the green/ pecans, Van K. Brocks LIGHTERED speaks to me. The books 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. Hes been to the sacred wood and brought back fire. R T SmithVan 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 MottScholarship, love of nature and family, the honoring through poetry of art, music, and travel, indignant witnessing to historys evil absurdities these and many other passions assure the power of Brocks chromatics. He hears even the shards of mosaics as songs that awaken epiphanies, and theres grief in his poems that we are too often fragmentary man, with some parts perhaps the most essential for our humanity unfinished. Ive followed his work for years. I value this up-to-date definitive collection. David Ray