From Publishers Weekly
The poems in Halpern's latest collection are bittersweet postcards redolent with travels and memories. A cafe in Tangiers, vacations on Maine's coast, a boyhood in Chicago, the shooting of a friend on a Mexican busall are pieces in a jigsaw puzzle that might explain how the poet's destiny, in turn, took shape or failed to materialize. In one section Halpern summons the muses or spirits of Dante, "the bandit" Caravaggio, Keats, Pound and Li Po, but most of the poems here flow from personal experience. Halpern proclaims that scars on the flesh betray the mind's lesions ("part of the map marking/ the pain we've had to endure"). But as he reflects on death, scattered families, the end of loves and pleasures, a faith in humanity glimmers like fireflies "born again elsewhere/ in the line of small trees." Halpern is editor of Antaeus and Ecco Press.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
The poems in Halpern's seventh collection are marked by an imagination attentive to the textures of ordinary life, making setting and tone as significant as content. Set in North Africa, Italy, and along the New England coast, they explore the feelings and relationships evoked by specific memories: "It's easy to recall what doesn't heal,/ more difficult to call back what leaves/ no mark. . . . " Like the "tango" his poems exhibit a variety of rhythms, line lengths, and formal constraints. His most moving poems are his most directly personal: speaking with his dead father; waking a young woman he imagined dead; or imagining his future child ("Sometimes, if the distance is not too great,/it is possible for the unborn/ to walk with us. Perhaps they are the angels."). A graceful, formally ambitious book recommended for contemporary collections. Robert Hudzik, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
