Brock's interest in poetry was inspired by a paperback anthology of modern verse which he picked up idly as a bored 18-year-old, waiting to be de-mobbed from the Royal Navy at the end of the Second World War.
Its title, An Attempt at Exorcism, touches on the essentially personal nature of Brock's work, the frankness of which connects him to confessional poetry which at that time was in the ascendancy in the United States.
[1] Brock left the police to become an advertising copywriter, a profession which he claimed to despise, but in which he became very successful, creating the famous strapline for the UK Financial Times newspaper of 'No FT. No comment'.
The traumatic experience of marital conflict and divorce permeated his poetry at the time, for instance in the bitter and powerful An Arrangement for Seeing Children.
Brock wrote two of the best-known poems of the last century, Five Ways to Kill a Man and Song of the Battery Hen, but his work deserves wider recognition beyond these anthology favourites.
Inspired by a performance of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem and written quickly, the poem has an air of authority which Brock's reading emphasises.