{"id":6621,"date":"2026-09-24T14:21:58","date_gmt":"2026-09-24T03:51:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=6621"},"modified":"2026-09-24T14:33:31","modified_gmt":"2026-09-24T04:03:31","slug":"launching-steve-brocks-out-of-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2026\/09\/launching-steve-brocks-out-of-season\/","title":{"rendered":"Launching Steve Brock’s OUT OF SEASON"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Earlier this month, a huge crowd gathered in the back garden of the Wheatsheaf Hotel as Nicholas Jose<\/a> launched Steve Brock<\/a>‘s latest poetry collection, Out of Season<\/a><\/em>. The event featured a musical performance by Simone Brock and Brooke Chapman, and a reading by Steve.<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

We’re pleased to be able to share Nicholas’s launching speech \u2013 read on.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

It is a pleasure to be here tonight to launch Steve Brock\u2019s new book of poems, Out of Season<\/em>. It\u2019s his fourth book over a twenty year period, so he knows what he\u2019s doing as a poet. I\u2019ve long admired Steve\u2019s work as translator, editor and advocate for multicultural writing and in support of a multicultural society in Australia. To use the M word. I\u2019ve enjoyed his poetry for a long time too.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The good thing about being asked to launch a book is that you read it carefully, more than once. You sit with it. That only increases the enjoyment. It\u2019s really rewarding. The trouble is you then have to say why. As launcher it\u2019s my job to find words that describe and explain my enjoyment to you \u2013 to put my finger on what is just so good and so special about this beautiful new book. That\u2019s the hard part. It would be easier just to listen to Steve read.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But here goes. As the title suggests, this is a book about time. It\u2019s full of references to time. Counting the minutes and seconds. Giving precise dates \u2013 3 March 2026, for example, for the poem called \u2018Upside down moon\u2019 dedicated to Juan Garrido-Salgado, about an Adelaide evening when Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish was in conversation with Mike Ladd as part of Constellations: Not Writers Week festival. Only a few weeks ago, it seems, already memorialised in this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The different ages of the poet. Eight or nine years old when his father saves him from being burned. Seventeen when he bought a book by Borges in Spanish in Argentina. Eighteen when he throws up at a party in someone\u2019s house. Fifty when he relates to Tu Fu, the Tang dynasty Chinese poet who was also fifty when he wrote the poem the poet \u2013 let\u2019s call him Steve \u2013 is reading in Adelaide now.\u00a0Periods of time are invoked. \u2018Thirty years\u2019, in particular, tolls like a bell through the collection. And with it the changes that can happen across that length of time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The book opens with a magnificent poem about a car, \u2018Archaeology of a 98 Magna\u2019. It\u2019s nearly thirty years old and going off to the wrecker. It\u2019s full of traces of the past, all items past their use-by date now, yet still the poet can pull \u2018just one last poem from your remains\u2019, he tells the car. This is a book about where poetry comes from and where it goes. The poem comes out of a particular point in time and turns it into an occasion to be remembered. In that way poetry can make its own time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The 98 Magna is followed by a \u2018thirty-year-old Commodore\u2019, the poet\u2019s father\u2019s. He goes out at night to check the oil, puts the dip stick in and reads the calibrations under the streetlamp, and under the Milky Way and Orion. In that larger view he is reading his own calibrations as he dips his stick into this world, while remembering his father who has died. The image, the metaphor is suggested without being signposted, subtle and odd, in a moving way. In another poem a second-hand car provides language for what poets do: tinkering, \u2018salvaging\u2019, as technical terms again become metaphorical \u2013 \u2018transmission\u2019, \u2018exhaust manifold\u2019 (whatever that is, but it doesn\u2019t matter if we don\u2019t know, it evokes anyway), \u2018to make it hum again\u2019. That hum is what Steve Brock\u2019s poems achieve. They spring into place: complex mechanisms, relaxed then taut, attentive, rhythmic, mobile, end-stopped. Sometimes one long sentence runs through a short poem before landing on a final full-stop. Often a long period or a large passage of time and space held in the complex moment of the poem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Time can mark space, as in the poem \u2018Distance\u2019 where the correlation is made stunningly evident when the poet\u2019s father, lying medicated in hospital in the dark, speaks the words: \u2018six miles\u2019. He has counted the seconds between the lightning and the thunder to work out how far away the storm is. As if spelling out his own distance from the dark. Haven\u2019t we all done that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such specificity is a presence in these poems. They start from something ordinary and follow where it goes as layers of memory, mood and emotion fill in over the top, towards a new kind of resolution. The book\u2019s six parts are marked by rites of passage \u2013 death, loss, renewal. The last part is the longest and has the longest poems. They return to the formative experience of Latin America in the poet\u2019s life \u2013 literary Argentina, Spanish-speaking friends, travel, youth and age, accompanied by others or alone \u2013 which then folds back into Adelaide, the home place, connected in so many ways. \u2018This small city\u2019 \u2013 the same phrase used of Adelaide and Santa Fe in Argentina \u2013 registers similarity where there is difference, just as Adelaide\u2019s familiarity becomes estranging when a friend dies and the place where you used to meet is bulldozed, leaving only a fa\u00e7ade door to nowhere. When he is in Buenos Aires the poet remembers writing to his father thirty years ago. It gets complicated as the poems weave together across the book, circling and multifocal. Words, phrases and details fit together with cumulative effect in as not only places change with time, but selves, roles and the world around us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That feeling produces one of my favourite lines in the collection. Finding that the newsagency near the station no longer sells newspapers, the poet walks back to the station \u2018empty-handed \/ like a character in a novel no one reads anymore\u2019. Wow! Borges would have liked that one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have I found a way to pinpoint what is special about Steve\u2019s poetry? Probably not. I suspect it\u2019s to do with qualities that he has found elsewhere and translated \u2013 transported \u2013 into his own work. His language is unrhetorical. It\u2019s not flashy or extreme. It\u2019s plain, even understated, which gives him the clarity to \u2018read the world\u2019, as he puts it, while seeing through it at the same time. There\u2019s something of the transparency and candour of his Latin American masters, Borges and Cortazar, and it\u2019s not dissimilar to a valued quality in classical Chinese poetry that has no easy equivalent in English, d\u00e0n<\/em>, meaning something like \u2018the taste of water\u2019. It\u2019s so not there it\u2019s there, or the other way round. I\u2019m not putting my finger on it. Out of Season.<\/em> Now launched. Thank you.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Steve read a number of poems from the collection, but one stands out in particular: ‘Arroyo Leyes’. Steve explained that the ‘camalote’ mentioned in the poem is a kind of water hyacinth native to South America.<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Arroyo Leyes<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

After sundown we cross
the autopista<\/em>
and walk down white sand roads
to the riverbank
a subsidiary
of the R\u00edo Paran\u00e1<\/p>\n\n\n\n

it\u2019s a clear evening
and from afar
the water appears still
but here on the grassy bank
the water flows
at a fast pace
carrying with it a solitary
camalote<\/p>\n\n\n\n

my friend tells a story
about how they travel
downstream and bump
into other camalotes
until they clump together<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I contemplate again
Donne\u2019s sermon
no man is an island<\/em>
rather we are camalotes
floating down the river
on our hopeful journeys.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Santa Fe, Argentina<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Earlier this month, a huge crowd gathered in the back garden of the Wheatsheaf Hotel as Nicholas Jose launched Steve Brock‘s latest poetry collection, Out of Season. The event featured a musical performance by Simone Brock and Brooke Chapman, and … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_seo_schema_type":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-for-fun"],"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-1IN","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6621"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6624,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6621\/revisions\/6624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}