In today’s poetry news roundup, we bring you the news that the world of poetry has lost another brilliant poet. Lucie Brock-Broido passed away on 6^th March at her home following a short illness.

Poet Lucie Brock-Broido Passes Away at 61

Yet more sad news has hit the literary world in America with the sad news of the death of the poet and teacher Lucie Brock-Broido. At just 61 years of age is the latest in a list of illustrious poets to have passed away this year; she is also the youngest. Ms Brock-Broido passed away on 6^th March 2018 following a brief illness.

Born on May 22^nd, 1956, in Pittsburgh Ms Brock-Broido lost her father at the age of 12. The next day she wrote a love letter to him; it was this letter that later led her to write the poem “Father, in Drawer”.  Following his death, she returned to school before going to John Hopkins University where she earned both a bachelor’s and then a master’s degree. She also had a master’s in fine arts from Columbia.

It was at this point that she started writing poetry on a more permanent basis, she also went into the teaching profession, and taught at Bennington College, Princeton University and Harvard before finally moving to Columbia where she became the head of poetry concentration at the School of the Arts.

At one point in her career Ms Brock-Broido was writing as many as 300 poems each year, but in recent years she had slowed this down. Her last book took 7 years to complete. According to her editor at the time of her death, she had been working on around a dozen new poems which were intended for use in a future poetry collection.

Her style of poetry was possessed of a formal rigour and had an element of supernatural awareness about it, qualities that placed her firmly in a lineage with fellow American poets Sylvia Plath and Emily Dickinson, although she herself listed Wallace Stevens amongst her influences. “Stay Illusion” is the last collection that was published before her death. It was a finalist in National Book Award, as well as the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award.

“Giraffe” a new poem by Brock-Broido is due to be published later this month, on 26^th March, in The New Yorker. At the same time, newyorker.com will also have a reading by the poet available

Many of the poems that Brock-Broido wrote lent a voice to the character of her poem, these voices include Jessica McClure, the 18-month-old who tumbled into a well in Texas in 1987 and remained there for 60 hours whilst s rescue operation was mounted. From these events “Jessica from the well” emerged as a small epic that was written in 6 parts. The work appeared in her first book.

Ms Brock-Broido is survived by her sister Julie Parmenter, her half-sister Melissa Greenwald and her step-sister Ann McLennon.