Now available: Term as in Aftermath by Alan Halsey

 Term as in Aftermath (Press Release) (101.79 KB)

Term as in Aftermath is Alan Halsey’s first full-length collection since his retrospectives Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006). Here is the complete ‘Looking-glass for Logoclasts’ alongside the first viewing of his 'Unkempt Archives' and in the title sequence re-readings of texts from the schoolbooks of the ancient Egyptians via Seneca and Stein to The Tennis Court Oath and the codenames of recent military operations, together with translations of newly discovered fragments of Mercurialis and further studies of the lizopard.

What Paul Merchant has called Halsey’s ‘kabbalah of cultural signs' made Andy Sanderson ‘feel a fierce horror and pity for language’ while Ian Seed was ‘startled into seeing language and its possibilities in a fresh light’ and Nikki Santilli remarked that ‘Halsey mixes his materials until the work is emptied of even a post-modern grin’. ‘The craftsmanship is impeccable, the lines breathe intelligence’ wrote Lyndon Davies, and Tony Lopez: ‘pure intelligence of various means of departure, refined and sharpened up, exactly located, appropriately geared, and cutting right into ore as we dream’.

About Alan Halsey

Born in London 1949. Philosophy degree, London 1972. Ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye 1979-97. Has lived in Sheffield since 1997, working as a specialist bookseller & publishing West House Books. Married Geraldine Monk in 1998.

Alan founded West House in 1994 to publish contemporary poetry and poetry-related work. In recent years he has run it in partnership with Geraldine Monk.

Alan Halsey's books include Perspectives On The Reach (1981), Five Years Out (1989), Reasonable Distance (1992), The Text of Shelley's Death (1995) and A Robin Hood Book (1996).

What others say about Alan Halsey

As Alan Halsey has written, Sing or else.  Or was that Jerry Lee Lewis? Could be either, they’re such similar figures in my mind.’

    —Kelvin Corcoran

...his most original contribution is the re-absorbing [of] verbal dispersion into poetry in a manner one is tempted to describe as post-concrete... One might alternatively describe his work as Neo-baroque .

    —Yann Lovelock

The few attempts I've seen at dealing with his work seem to throw their hands up and just regard him as a force of nature. I think I can agree with that. His writings are the dark side of the moon, and reading them from the front isn’t very profitable.

    —Michael Peverett

[he] has a form which is about as bilateral as a mash of notes just before Monk’s left hand has hit them

    —Tony Baker

It seems to me Mr Halsey’s poetry (like all logoclastic poetry) foregrounds the communicative value of discourse.

    —Gregory Vincent St Thomasino

Alan Halsey is one of our more singular voices, and the Stride selected is a good place to start. He has a number of scholarly and antiquarian interests that can leak into and inform his work as a poet

Alan Halsey is one of our more singular voices, and the Stride selected is a good place to start. He has a number of scholarly and antiquarian interests that can leak into and inform his work as a poet; hence his prose 'treatment' of Robin Hood (maintaining an interest in British myth) and the Shelley volume, which in prose and in a loose-lined verse tells the story of the title from various viewpoints, aping the scholar's variorum approach, but taking off into new directions with the writer's own sensibility interjected instead of the more reticent scholar's. But his latest career-summary, the beautiful Marginalien, which can be recommended both for its contents and as an object (a lesson in the art of design from Glen Storhaug of Five Seasons).

    —Shearsmen Books