Cinematic, nostalgic, and unabashedly raw, Halpern’s tenth collection, Air, hungers for the entirety of human experience. A mythic quotidian is recounted through rich and often confessional exposition: the love of a father for his daughter, of dear people and places, of curious insects and birds. Musing unapologetically on themes intimate and wistful, Halpern writes to French actresses, old lovers, a pot of stew, insomnia, and to friends past and present, sharing lessons of the literary world. As he reminisces on once-realities and questions his own observations—the duplicity of memory—these poems transcend form, the world presenting itself anew. Halpern is a literary icon, and in Air he proves that poetry is quite literally all around us.
ISBN: 9781556597251
Format: Paperback
from “Air”
In the little house filled with dogs and resilient plants
She left only a glass and a blank sheet of paper.
The stadium up the road like a siren called with silent applause
To climb up, climb beyond the seats and the grass
Where a team of young girls kicked a white ball.
Maybe she knew they were there, maybe she was calling back
A line a male poet committed to the page decades ago,
About time made simple by the loss of detail.
Maybe she then cast out every detail but the unencumbered air
To keep it simple. And then fluttered from us.
Praise for Air
“Like a boat “drifting back at sunset,” Daniel Halpern’s Air brings together lyrics and prose portraits composed in a world made only of time. Driven by the love of language, passions, a timeframe, Air holds vanished intimacies, remembered tastes, recalled scents, and strivings. These exquisite poems and recollections loosely pull back together a literary life. Time passes in these poems with the ease of breath, in the scent of clementines, where the domestic anchors alongside meals, company, and the flirtation of words. . . . Halpern offers not just lyrics holding moments in time, sometimes at dawn and sometimes at the ending of things, but also lingering glimpses into the lives of artists, writers, patrons, and poets. The logic and beauty of Air is that time is never judged, only reassembled in the symphony called life.”—Claudia Rankine
“What does a poet who has done so much in poetry do in poems at this point? Daniel Halpern gives us one great answer: He continues to write out of witness rooted in memory’s buried treasures and elegies, full of seeds still flowering. Halpern remains as romantic, reflective, and restless as his New York noir-ish book cover. He travels, he risks, he dances, he estranges. Poems refracted through lyric, urbane, cosmopolitan lenses. Air records what cannot be replicated by machine and screen, only embodied, dreamed. This remarkable new collection exemplifies what it means to live, love, and marvel in poetry.”—Terrance Hayes
“Crystalline, erudite, and full of deep feeling, Halpern’s latest is the sum total of a life spent living, breathing, and flourishing poetry—and the result is an ever-evolving voice, not just sterling, but wrought from a deep love for the art itself. A true feast.”—Ocean Vuong
“I’ve always thought of [Daniel Halpern] as a poet on the model of the Roman poet Horace, with a poised and immensely civilized mind for the life we live, its large and small panics and decorums, and a civilized balance in his verse, in which orderliness can sometimes seem sinister or wry, and sometimes seem a gift of the kind we can give to one another, like a well-set table.”—Robert Hass, Washington Post