Something Shining
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
Widely praised for his earlier collections, Daniel Halpern has grown steadily in stature and attainment. Now, with Something Shining, his first collection of new poems in seven years, he gives us an ambitious, wide-ranging meditation on birth, love, and maturity, marking a turning point in both his life and his work.
These beautifully crafted poems explore relations between lovers, between friends, between fathers and children. Written by the light of a young daughter's presence, in the distinctive lyrical language that Ted Hughes described as "so free and effortless and unerring," these poems ponder the fading of the body and the struggle that consciousness wages to keep the self afloat. And into this intimate world also enter a surprising array of characters: ancient Chinese poets and modern Cuban musicians, Charlie Parker, Chekhov, and the dervish mystic Rumi. But it is the poet's awareness of his own frailty ("the days run out--no longer oneself," he writes in "Fugue"), that, together with the extraordinary beauty he discovers in environments familiar and exotic, unifies this collection. The work of a poet at the top of his form, Something Shining confirms Halpern's place in our national literature.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Elegies, ghazals, epigrams, travel poems, and domestic verses present Halpern (Foreign Neon) as an articulate, amiable, comfortable, middle-aged man contemplating, in this ninth collection, mortality, fatherhood, friendship, food and wine--sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. While alert to nuances of feeling, Halpern's lines lack acoustic and formal interest: many seem inert both aurally and intellectively. In one quietly celebratory poem, "We place beach chairs just beyond the tidal line/ and here we sit. Shorts and T-shirts. Yet not wholly here." "Direction" explains portentously "my path is not destined/ although the one direction now is forward." "Midnight: Triadic Ghazal" makes this its central image: "In the dark we walk through rooms/ familiar as questions/ asked of us over and over." And in the entirely predictable "Dance," "The evening moves on the heat of the rhythm." Sometimes Halpern seems to be trying for camp, as in the bathetic Latinity of "Infestation" ("gentle sleep/ that's said to be indispensable/ for cerebral stability") or at the end of "Beauty & Restraint": "even the sun, hovering in this paradise,/ eventually goes down." But most of the poems come across as sincere and slack, with the genuinely campy "Carnival Food" and "Carnival Mood," and a diverting sestina-like poem in five-line stanzas, coming across as the only real inventions. Halpern seems content with careful records of his feelings and deeds. It's hard to imagine readers will feel the same. FYI: Halpern co-founded the Ecco Press, now a Harper imprint, and remains its editorial director.
