Selected Poems

Graham, W. S.

ISBN 10: 0912946733 / ISBN 13: 9780912946733

Published by Ecco Press, 1980

About this Item

8vo. Black cloth and gold boards, front blind stamped with initials "W S G." Complete jacket with lightest indications of handling. 112pp.

Seller Inventory # ABE-1712232529928

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Selected Poems
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Publication Date: 1980
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0912946733
• ISBN 13: 9780912946733
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Condition: Near Fine
• Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

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

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