Cynics, says our author, “write books / by Edwin Brock / illustrated by / his wife.” Readers already familiar with the wry, sometimes dour work of the British poet Edwin Brock will recall that his wife, Elizabeth, contributed the jacket illustrations to his two previous collections published here (Invisibility Is the Art of Survival and The Portraits The Poses). Now they have combined their talents and complementary satiric visions to produce “A Guide to the Isms.” With the biting verse of the one, and the charming, mischievous sketches of the other, Paroxisms prods some of our...

The publication in 1972 of Invisibility Is the Art of Survival, the author’s own selection of poems from earlier books brought out in England, introduced Edwin Brock to American readers. This new collection, The Portraits & The Poses, will further the acquaintance with a fresh and forceful voice, one which David Ignatow has called “the best in English contemporary poetry.” These are highly personal poems: the “poses,” the postures and bafflements of everyday life as Brock sees it; the “portraits,” pithy vignettes of everyday people and their relationships as he knows them. Yet...

Invisibility Is the Art of Survival marks the first appearance in this country, in book form, of the work of Edwin Brock. Born in London in 1927, Brock says he has spent the subsequent years waiting for something to happen, occupying his time as a sailor, journalist, policeman, and adman, in that order. Yet none of this, he feels, has touched him, “except with a fine patina of invisibility.” Poetry, however, is for him an act of self-definition “which sometimes goes so deep that you become what you have defined. And this,” he adds, “is the nearest thing to an activity I have yet...