Winterreisen

Alan Halsey, Kelvin Corcoran

These collaborative sequences were written during the winter months 2015-18. The poets’ journeys took them from Hove via Paris to Istanbul, on to Baghdad then across the Steppes and along the Silk Road. They nearly reached the North Pole before landing on the Moon. Returning to England they recorded its savage desolation. Our bedraggled pair were rescued only by discovering in their battered rucksacks a formal austerity as regular and elliptical as the world itself, selflessly announced to the innocent reader with each desperate and conclusive breath.

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.