The Forgotten Mirror of Edwin Brock: A Journey Through Alienation and Artifice
In the dusty catacombs of 20th-century British poetry, the name Edwin Brock is seldom invoked without a puzzled glance or a quick Google search. Yet, those who have ventured into the terse and emotionally raw realm of his verse understand immediately: Brock was no minor voice, but a devastating one—clear, unwavering, unbeautiful in the finest sense of that word. Born in 1927 in Dulwich, South London, Brock’s trajectory did not follow that of the usual poetic career. He was no Oxford artiste polished by classical education, but a Royal Navy signalman in World War II and later a Metropolitan police constable—two professions that rarely lead to publication in literary quarterlies. And yet, Brock’s voice emerged with startling clarity, barbed by experience, untouched by affectation.
Brock’s poetic debut came when a poem was serendipitously accepted by the magazine “The Listener” in the 1950s—a work pulled from his drawer and sent in on a whim. That poem caught the attention of the poet and editor Tambimuttu, eventually leading to Brock’s first major collection, _An Attempt at Exorcism_ (1959). If there is one persistent thread in Brock’s works, it is the dissection of illusion. His lines cut through sentimentality and ego like a scalpel through cartilage. He speaks not from rebellion, but from a durable disillusionment that produces art both uncomfortable and true.
One of Brock’s most anthologized poems, “Five Ways to Kill a Man,” is a clinical inventory of humanity’s escalating brutality. In it he writes:
> “There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man…
> You can do it with a simple lever, a knife or a ballpoint pen.”1
This poem navigates the absurdity of man’s increasingly industrialized violence, tying it unconsciously to the banality of everyday objects. It is not merely a protest poem; rather, it is a lament culled from the undistilled understanding that cruelty is neither new nor exceptional—it is modern, mechanized, and mundane. This is a snapshot of a poet alert to the hypocrisy of civilization’s moral platitudes.
Brock’s autobiographical volume, _Here. Now. Always._ (1977), provides deeper insight into his philosophical temperament. It is a collection brimming with recollection, emotional candor, and illuminating bitterness. In “Song of the Battery Hen,” he uses the metaphor of a caged hen to probe themes of domestic life, masculinity, and freedom:
> “Small victories she never cared for,
> the prize an inch of straw,
> the comfort compensation for despair.”2
What Brock manages to do here is divine the poetic from the bleakness of middle-class stasis. His tone remains unusually free from seduction; he does not cajole the reader into empathy but instead lays the words flat against the page like dissected scalps. His poetic mirror does not flatter—it shows the cracks.
Though never formally a philosopher, Brock’s stark understanding of human contradiction holds a deeply existential character. His poetry floats above confessional, often breaking open into what feels like an anti-ideological meditation. He seems governed by what might be termed a metaphysical exactitude: a determination to leave no ambiguity around the inescapabilities of self-awareness, illusion, and entropy.
Take, for instance, his lesser-known poem “The Portrait,” where he writes:
> “When no one watches, I am kind,
> but this is not a virtue,
> it is privacy exacted in disguise.”3
This line is a shiv slid under psychology’s ribs. Here, Brock is not simply confessing to duality; he is dissecting it, dissolving both the performative self and the unobservable core in a single stroke. In doing so, he redefines ‘virtue’ not as a moral crest but as a circumstantial mask. Such lines move poetry into Bunyan terrain—neither cynical nor religious, but archetypal, testing the soul’s resonance in the echo chamber of self-deception.
What lingers most hauntingly in Brock’s work is an atmosphere—more than a doctrine or stance. I recall encountering Brock late one October, inside a failing used-book shop in Delft, his _A Family Affair_ (1969) between a travel guide to the Orkneys and a copy of Marcus Aurelius. Lifting his volume, I came upon these words:
> “No one changes.
> Only circumstances rile the surface,
> like an earthquake over bones too long inert.”4
I must admit, there came a moment then—a philosophical silence blooming within my interior condescensions. For here, Brock detailed something uncomfortably real. His rejection of transformation was not nihilistic. It was a sober footnote to Freud’s observation: men do not change, they adapt blindfolded. Brock’s poems scratch at the mineral core of the reader—peeling off the myth of free will, of inherent goodness, of redemption as we like to narrate it.
And yet, to read Brock is not to be left in despair. His poems bear witness not to oblivion, but to unornamented existence. Even in his declarations of emotional fraudulence, there is a strange nobility—like the soldier who drops his gun not because he abhors war but because he knows its endgame. There resides in Brock an ethical finality, an unwillingness to lie with literature. What greater affinity can a poet demand from his reader?
I have often pondered on a line from his poem “For My Children”:
> “Even love, I have kept it safe from you,
> that you might trust its absence more than its misuse.”5
It reads like a father’s confession at the threshold of death, but also like the confession of art to civilization. Brock refuses to give us what we want, lest we destroy it by our customary gluttony. He preserves integrity by withholding.
Reflecting on Brock’s poetry, one draws not moral lessons, but ontological meditations. What is left when illusion evaporates? Not joy, perhaps—but neither despair. A function, a stance, a clarity that lacks balm but infinitely respects one’s intelligence. In a world of aesthetic excess and post-truth ornamentation, Edwin Brock insists: look, but do not pretend to like what you see. Be honest. Be cold. Be true.
Readers who seek literature not merely for aesthetic transport but for the scalpel of revelation would do well to explore Brock. His collected works, particularly _Five Ways to Kill a Man and Other Poems_ (1990), offer a lasting confrontation with the human condition that is both caustic and chastening.6
That night in Delft, I bought the poetry collection alongside Marcus Aurelius. And now I finger both volumes often—Brock beside the Stoic—each guarding a different form of silence. For some echo more in withdrawal than declaration. Some poets, like Edwin Brock, do not call out the truth. They mutter it, trench-deep and marrow-real, daring you to pause and listen.
By Martijn Benders – Notebook Dep. of the Moonmoth Monestarium
alienation, modernity, poetic ethics, British poetry, identity, stoicism, interiority
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1 Brock, Edwin. “Five Ways to Kill a Man.” Originally published in _The Listener_, later collected in _Five Ways to Kill a Man and Other Poems_, Anvil Press Poetry, 1990.
2 Brock, Edwin. “Song of the Battery Hen.” _Here. Now. Always._, Gollancz, 1977.
3 Brock, Edwin. “The Portrait.” Uncollected manuscript, University of Reading Poetry Archives.
4 Brock, Edwin. “A Family Affair.” Gollancz, 1969.
5 Brock, Edwin. “For My Children.” _Collected Poems_, Anvil Press, 1980.
6 See Pettinger, Alwin. *Modern Poets and the Quiet Resistance*, Oxford Literary Review, Vol. 34, 2003.