From Publishers Weekly
This sixth poetry collection by the editor of Antaeus and Echo Press mostly flows from personal experience, recalling vacations on Maine's coast, a boyhood in Chicago, the shooting of a friend on a Mexican bus. PW called the poems "bittersweet postcards redolent with travels and memories."
Copyright 1988 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.
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