Air - by Daniel Halpern (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The poems in Air inhabit the state of being consciousness, delving into the nature of solitude and the pleasures of the human organism.

Cinematic, nostalgic, and unabashedly raw, Daniel Halpern's latest poetry collection, Air, hinges on the human experience. The normalities of life are recounted through rich, intimate and often confessional exposition, drawing on people and places, insects and birds, and on the conscious exploration of musings that are both dear and curious to the author. Halpern writes to French actresses, insomnia, old lovers, a pot of stew, friends from past and present. As he reminisces on once-realities and questions his own observations--the duplicity of memory--these poems transcend form and the world becomes anew. Air, like each of our breaths, proves that poetry is quite literally all around us.

Review Quotes

Praise for Tango

"The poems in Halpern's latest collection are bittersweet postcards redolent with travels and memories. . . . But as he reflects on death, scattered families, the end of loves and pleasures, a faith in humanity glimmers like fireflies "born again elsewhere/ in the line of small trees."--Publishers Weekly

Praise for Selected Poems

"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 in 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. 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 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 some- how 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 Gordiner

Praise for Daniel Halpern

"Despite their assurance, their casualness, their acceptance of the exotic as commonplace, Halpern's poems exist as emblems of survival, an unusual survival, full of charm, wit, and a saving, though precarious, uncertainty. Halpern says he travels on credit. I say he pays hard cash."--Mark Strand

"Wherever he goes, he exercises his taste for the exotic, his curiosity about states of disorientation and the fevers of a civilization. The ultimate and inescapable geography of his poems is the heightened world of the poets senses."--Stanley Kunitz

"Daniel Halpern is a poet of rare ability, a poet who knows how to craft a poem that gives the reader not just an insight into the world, but into the complexity of human experience itself."--Robert Penn Warren

About the Author

Daniel Halpern is a poet, publisher, and the founder of Ecco Press, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. He was the co-founder, along with Paul Bowles, of the literary magazine Antaeus, which he launched while living in Morocco and edited for over 25 years. He has written nine poetry collections and edited over 15 books and anthologies. He is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Furthermore, Halpern has taught at The New School, Columbia University, and Princeton University. He is currently based in New York City and Princeton, New Jersey.