Edwin Brock
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- Other uses: Edwin C. Brock (Egyptologist).
Edwin Brock (born in 1927 in London, died in 1997) was a British poet. Following two years that he spent in the Royal Navy shortly after the end of the Second World War he wrote Five Ways to Kill a Man, an emotionless poem highlighting stupid deaths, the harshness of war and the increasing loss of humanity, as shown in the distance between the killer and the victim (needing to touch him in the first stanza, and not needing to know who he is in stanzas 4-5)
[edit] Titles
Brock has authored over a dozen poetry collections, a novel and an autobiography.
- An Attempt at Exorcism (poetry collection, 1959)
- The Little White God (novel, 1962)
- Here, Now, Always (autobiography, 1977)
5 Ways to Kill A Man
There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:
you can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.
Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince and a
castle to hold your banquet in.
Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.
In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no one needs for several years.
These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.
Edwin Brock
