Biographical note: Alan Halsey was born in London in 1949. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 until 1996 and moved to Sheffield in 1997, continuing to work as a specialist bookseller and as editor of West House Books. His major publications include Five Years Out (1989), The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995), Wittgenstein’s Devil (2000) and Marginalien (2005). He has written several short studies of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and re-edited his Death’s Jest-Book in 2003.
BIC Basic
EAN13: 9781844711062 ISBN-10: 1844711064 ISBN-13: 9781844711062 Author: Alan Halsey Title: Not Everything
Remotely Series: Salt Modern
Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCF1 Publisher: Salt
Publishing Pub date: 15-Jul-06 Extent: 292pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 17 mm Weight: 438 gms Supplier:Gardners
Books Supplier:Ingram
Book Group Supplier:Inbooks
(James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 14.99 Price: USD 21.95 Rights: World
Short
description/annotation: A major selection of
the work of Alan Halsey, a vital figure of the British small press
scene who has been widely published in England and the USA. Halsey
seeks ‘linguistic innovation’ in the unlikeliest of
places and having found it, delivers it to us with playful intelligence,
serious comedy and lashings of wit.
Main description:Not
Everything Remotely is the widest-ranging gathering of Halsey’s
poems to date. Some have not previously been published while
many appeared in fugitive editions and collections now out of
print. It brings together poems which slowly developed into broadly-related
sequences such as the verse-letters begun in 1979 as communiques
from the Welsh border and continued into the ’90s tracking
the savageries of the Thatcher years. It also collects his ‘emblem’ poems,
in which traditional devices are reworked within the modernist
perspective; these and other short poems veer between political
epigram and an Ars Poetica. Of his recent work there is a selection
from the sequence in progress A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts.
Halsey’s poems often draw on familiar forms of discourse
such as the financial, philosophical and journalistic, set alongside
the specialist and marginal vocabularies used in such studies
as linguistics, ufology and the paranormal; they may or may not
be a satire which is enacted ‘in the absence of a validated
hierarchy of discourse’ (Tim Woods).
Table of contents:
At the Front
55 Texts for the Journey
Six Letters on Change & Exchange, Hay-on-Wye, 1979
Another Loop in our Days
4 Rounds for Springtime after Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Wallace
Stevens’
From an Albion Notebook
Perspectives on the Reach
Bilateral Poem from The Interpretation of Dreams
Uncollected Lyrics of the Individual Soul
Display
Transcript
Summer Solstice ’81
January: Aphorisms, Proverbs and Presocratic Fragments
Translation of the Heraclitean Fragment 53
As of Military Domains & Salvation Rituals
The Future of Poetry 1982
Bilingual
Narrative Beginning ‘Pure and best mind’
Five Accounts of the Arrest of English Poetry
Auto Dada Café: Apologies for Absence
Auto Dada Café: Set-piece
‘Views to Follow’
Remarks on Substance (Random Re-entries & Accessions)
Continuo
Ars Poetica: Geo. Puttenham to JW
A Book of Changes (Auguries & Telegrams)
27.1.84
Ars Poetica after Peter Huchel
Linked Verses 1984
Klondyke
Further Letters on Change & Exchange, Hay-on-Wye, 1984-85
Benefit of Hindrance
An Alphabet of Emblems
On Raleigh’s ‘External fancy time alone recureth’
Fragments of the Soul leaving Beulah & preparing for the Chapels
of North Wales
In Cusop Dingle, on Change & Exchange
Consolations of Philosophy
Three Moves between High & Low Pressure
Untitled
i.m. LZ
Three Attempts at an Epitaph for Geoffrey Grigson
Trailers & Nightsongs
Mimes for January
A Song for George Younger, Minister of State for Defence
Five Dedications for the Six Weeks of Lent
Broad Street Drag ’87
‘Formerly the Nineteenth Century and After’
Pastoral Incursions
The Capitalist Twilight Revisited
Eleatic Alert
Mayday Letter: Hay-on-Wye 1988
Re-reading Lorine Niedecker
An Eleatic Dirge for William Empson
Companion Studies
Table Talk
Answering a New Year Letter, 1989
Self-Portrait in a ’90s Bestiary
Illuminations for the De Règle Group (Tax & Financial
Planning Division)
On Change & Exchange: A Letter to JM, back in England, 1990
Subject to Terms
Summer 1990: An Eclogue
An Imitation, in a Prospect of Reasonable Distance, for KC
Song-Cycle 1991
Ashley Hayles: Twelve Poems from Los=Angeles=Notebooks
Notes on the Chapter of Light Removal
Travels in Four Parts
Ars Poetica
Hints for the New Year 1993
Table Talk Reunion: A Prose-Song
An Essay on Translation
Shadow Recension
Campaign Manoeuvres (Spells against Green Field Development)
Coffin Text, Radnor Recension
Short Attention Span: Committee Room Poems for Kelvin Corcoran
Ars Poetica
After R. F. Langley: The Upshot
An Alphabet for Karen Mac Cormack
Forest & Underwoods: Ars Duquesne U.P.
Three Texts after Bryan Wynter’s Imoos VI
Text-Book Remedies
Late Closing Friday
’Round Midnight take two: for GM
Ars Poetica
After Spicer
Ignorantia Elenchi
Bardo Panavision 1949
Ballads in the Days of ’49
Malcolm Lowry: An Uncollected Poem
Poem on his Birthday
Coherent Light
Syllabus of Errors
STC: Initials as Structure
Syllables of Recorded Time, for Gavin
Squibs for 1st January 2000
Easter Sunday 2000
Made in Sheffield: Two Lives
Ars Poetica after Maynard Mack
Dear Johan
From ‘Lives of the Poets’
Hollow Swaps
‘What is your understanding of the cultural and political
moment you find yourself in?’:
Answers to a Questionnaire
Monk for Monk
Ars Poetica 2003
Dear Ric
Ars Poetica: A Life of Joseph Warton
The Hunting of the Lizopard Resumed: Emblems from the Ship of Fools
Logbook
Ars Poetica after Mercurialis the Younger
Entries & Extracts Volume M
The Fragments concerning Dichotomedes
At Sixes & Sevens
Ars Poetica
Mercurialis the Younger, frag. LXVII
Ars Poetica for ‘Gutenberg: The Movie’
Ars Poetica: Empsonics including a remark by George Saintsbury
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Life Studies
The Frankenstein Franchise
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts When Broken
Arias & Duets from ‘Loagaeth, An Opera’
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Contra Memoriam
Fragments Doubtfully Ascribed to Mercurialis the Younger
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts: Horatian Reflections
Fin de Siècle: Three Lives
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts from the Phoenician
Ars Poetica
An Imitation, in a Prospect of Reasonable Distance, for KC
In a language like ours being spoken
by a people who are unlike us
there’s no way of saying that the words
Duty Free aren’t one hundred per cent
ontological proof. There’s a plain
scrubbed table with our soup and beer and us
being put in the picture
on the wall there, a true story
of provincial insurrection and tough luck.
Their words sound the same but are different
parts of speech, isn’t that what
the passport officer’s trying to explain
to the high commissioner? We can’t tell
if he’s looking us over or looking over us
at the corner of the picture where the clouds
have faded and the ugly gods of an unknown
master show through. The border guards
are setting up tables in the northern pavilion.
We’re setting off home along Broad Street
with the silk route behind us, I’m quoting from
memory a parallel text on the Altai Mountains.
Previous review quote:Wittgenstein’s
Devil showcases work that exhilaratingly explores language
and ideology, running different jargons and discourses together,
playfully using near- and half-rhyme to explore difference and
identity, in a poetry of passionate and stoical resistance.
Robert Potts
The Guardian
Previous review
quote:Wittgenstein’s Devil is
essential reading for anyone interested in what has been happening
in British poetry in the last thirty years.
David Kennedy
PN Review
Previous review
quote: The few attempts I’ve seen at
dealing with his work seem to throw their hands up and regard
him as a force of nature. I think I can agree with that. His
writings are the dark side of the moon, and reading them from
the front isn’t very profitable.
Michael Peverett
Previous review
quote: Pure intelligence of various means of
departure, refined and sharpened up, exactly located, appropriately
geared, and cutting right into ore as we dream. Here is a normally
secret and invisible antiquarian language spy, print-mining insect,
lizard watcher and dovetailed pistachio piss taker, book dealer
and forger, editor and printer’s devil, emblem inventor,
chiastic satirist, light-fingered anti-lyricist, lingering among
the keywords and search engines. It is maybe the last real sense
we’ll get about how we got to the late last days of New
Labour and it is our poetry, in English, not at all what is usually
packaged and put out around here.
Tony Lopez
Stride
Previous review
quote: On Marginalien: ‘This
is a truly exhilarating volume, delphic and intractable in places,
in other parts limpid and lyrical … In the end, one is brought
back to Halsey’s enormous respect for words and their antonyms,
echoes, ghost histories, spectral futures. He continues to create
a kabbalah of cultural signs, a dictionary of linguistic possibilities,
a stylish verbal music, in his essential role as courteous gadfly.
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