Selected Poems - Hardcover

Graham, W. S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0912946733 ISBN 13: 9780912946733

Publisher: Ecco Pr, 1980

Synopsis

Brief poems deal with the nature of language, space, observation, communication, silence, night, and dreams

About this title

From the Back Cover

"The way Mr. Halpern feels around inside his poems is...so free and effortless and unerring -- exploring all the strange corners, touching strange blooms and surprising corals in a submarine grotto, then coming up for air without a ripple. The personal poems -- the autobiographical surgical probings -- are very moving, painfully so m places, very pure. And the finger-testing of old wounds, old encysted shrapnel fragments. I could read a whole autobiography of those. And what a book it would be -- full of those mesmeric noticings (like 'Stazione') and curlings up, and scorpion tails, of old snapshots (like 'Coffee'). I love the way he dances through that last supper ('House of Flame') -- his sacrament of care, touching everything with a fringe of sun-glow or moon-glow. Till it's all prepared and in place."
-- Ted Hughes

"Daniel Halpern's poems are remarkable for their quiet -- the intimacy of a man talking honestly to himself...His lines break with the gentle snap of a twig, with natural poignancy. His range is not narrow; it achieves width by concentration. The quality of memory that Halpern strives after in poem after poem and which he repeatedly achieves is that nod of agreement which truth gives to experience, whether of praise or of pain."
-- Derek Walcott

"Daniel Halpern has such a strangely disturbing sense of place that somehow becomes internal rather than descriptive, while at the same time physically evocative -- something deeply sad. These poems speak to me in the best, most private way, as I always feel poetry should."
-- Nadine Gordimer

From the Inside Flap

s 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 t

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco Pr
• Publication date: 1980
• ISBN 10: 0912946733
• ISBN 13: 9780912946733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 112