Selected Poems [Paperback]

Daniel Halpern (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2, 1996

This generous selection from Daniel Halpern's seven previous volumes represents more than two decades of work. Finding a poetry in the dailiness of human experience, Halpern reaches into the least-known corners of the heart, with an ambition to transmute the occasions of life -- friendship, loss, isolation, love, and death -- into the melody of consciousness. Notable for their poise, lyric intensity, formal aptitude, and uncanny evocations of place and states of mind, these poems yield something special in their apparent simplicity.

From the restless youthful investigations of his first volume of poems, Traveling on Credit, to the more seasoned, penetrating vision of Tango and Foreign Neon, Halpern's inventions are graced by what Derek Walcott has praised as "the intimacy of a man talking honestly with himself." This collection illustrates the evolution of an authentic American voice whose power to delight and instruct is as undeniable as its mandate to disturb. A magnificent achievement.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Halpern ( Foreign Neon ), editor of the Ecco Press and Antaeus , is a poet who writes with an expansive modesty that allows him a freedom to consider what matters to him realistically. The poems are the record of his considerations. Their anti-heroic tone and stance are often delicately reportorial in style (and varying in subtlety), calling on seemingly plain language to tell us what has happened and its import. Fine balances are struck in the poetry; they are generally finer than in Halpern's several prose poems, also included. Characteristically, the balancing involves a weighing of contrasted neutrals and measured distances; his uses of whiteness ("White, the color of clarity / where nothing has to live") and stillness as metaphors, for instance, are nuanced, deliberate and memorable. The poetry reasons. It is refreshingly accessible, though in its understatement one can miss rhythm as a presence and feel, at times, the chill of a coolness. But the sense of removal in a speaker lets him think. It also lets us think. And that's useful.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

As an influential editor and anthologist, Halpern helped define the form, sound, and attitude of 1970s and 1980s American mainstream poetry, and-like that of the baby boomers he has nurtured and published-his own work employs careful, meditative pacing, plain language, and prolonged attentiveness to the more ephemeral qualities of nature: light, water, wind, and the sensed "presence/of a passing but important intimacy." Culled from six collections published between 1972 and 1991, these poems compose a low-key, leisurely world of empty beaches, simple-but-elegant meals, and overseas holidays experienced as a series of still lifes. Two- and three-stress lines inch earnestly toward enlightenments that never really dawn, creating a trancelike momentum that resists transcending "the attempt to say." Though Halpern's earlier work entices with flashes of exotica and modest surrealism, maturity affords him "nothing of the impure to violate/the water's white abstraction." It's a conscious aesthetic choice, but one whose subtlety can either reward a quiet moment or pass as unremarkably as "a quick/trace of mint at afternoon tea." For larger collections.
Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 219 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (April 2, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679765654
• ISBN-13: 978-0679765653
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,863,985 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Graham's Poems, not Halpern's, November 27, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Contrary to the editorial review above, this volume contains selected poems by W.S. Graham, and not by this Halpern character at all. It is an adequate selection of Sydney Graham's poetry, containing the full text of 'The Nightfishing", his key modernist poem, selections from the 'Letters' and all the best known later poems - 'Malcolm Mooney's Land', 'Clusters Travelling Outward', etc.

Nothing to do with Halpern, I promise.

4.0 out of 5 stars Who's Halpern?, February 27, 2004

By 

jonathan crossley (UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Selected Poems (Hardcover)

Heavan knows who Halpern is, but Graham was a marvellous poet, and this selection of his searching, wry and warm poetry is too small. Even the smaller poems - O Why Are You So Bright? for example - are as intriguing as the longer The Nightfishing, or Johann Joachim Quantzes Five Lessons.