They Who Saw The Deep

Geraldine Monk

At the heart of They Who Saw The Deep is the nature of water; water as giver and taker of life, luxuriant and lethal in equal measures. From the Libyan Sea to the savage sands of Morecambe Bay to the banks of the River Lune in the north of England where the poet’s ancestors were rowed across the river in their coffins to their final resting place. The eponymous sequence of poems finds the poet in the illusory safety of her kitchen whilst the outer world grows increasingly disturbed with wars and wild weather. It is set against the backdrop of the shipping forecast and weaves the myths and legends of the ancient Mesopotamians through a litany of migrations down the ages to the present day.

Versions of Martial

Alan Halsey

Versions of Martial offers a more generous choice of the Latin poet’s work than most translators allow. Alongside the familiar scurrilous and sometimes obscene epigrams Alan Halsey takes on aspects of the oeuvre which modern readers find deeply uncomfortable, particularly the poems addressed to the Emperor Domitian. These versions revel in anachronism and persistently refuse a fixed point of view: Martial is as often seen in Flavian Rome as in the England of New Labour and the Big Society, pointing up the mendacities of private wealth, promiscuity and poetry while quibbling with his academic editors and commentators. It sometimes seems that poet and translator don’t much care for each other but a little love-hate never goes amiss and they do enjoy a good spat.

A Horse That Runs

Kelvin Corcoran,
Alan Halsey

A sequence of forty 12-line poems Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey exchanged in the winter of 2014-15: an extended improvisation on prominent themes in the work of Wallace Stevens. Neither homage nor critique the sequence addresses the authors’ often conflicted feelings about Stevens’ poetry and particularly the evident division Stevens made between his personal and professional life and his writing -- a division which perhaps all poets must make and question to stay moderately sane.

From the Diaries of
John Dee

Nigel Wood, Alan Halsey

Mathematician, scholar, astronomer, adviser to Queen Elizabeth I ... alchemist, occultist, heretic ... John Dee (1527-1608) is one of the most enigmatic figures in British history. Using words and phrases from Dee’s diaries, Nigel Wood has constructed a series of poems that delve beneath the rumours and mythologies to offer a multifaceted portrait of a man seeking to understand the structure of the cosmos and his place within it. Accompanying the poems are visuals by Alan Halsey based on Dee’s transcriptions, charts and diagrams, his attempts to decode and interpret communications from other realms. Together the texts and images undertake a series of parallel explorations of his life and vision.

Collected Poems & Sequences 1981-91

Bill Griffiths
Ed. Alan Halsey

Poems & sequences from a remarkably prolific period of Griffiths’ work: Calendar Contents, The Great North Forest, Mid North Sea High, Quotidiana, Review of Brian Greenaway & Notes from Delvan MacIntosh, Scaffold Hill, Dialect Poems, Delvan’s Book, Satires, Star Fish Jail, Liam’s Song, The Secret Commonwealth, The Alien, The Coal World, The Lion Man, Amra Pamphlets 1996, Baldur’s Lacrimosa, Rousseau & the Wicked + 122pp of poems mostly uncollected or previously unpublished.