|
 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).
Bibliography |
-
Yearspace (Galloping Dog 1979)
-
Present State (Spectacular Diseases 1981)
-
Perspectives on the Reach (Galloping Dog 1981)
-
Auto Dada Cafe (Five Seasons 1987)
-
Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989)
-
Reasonable Distance (Equipage 1992)
-
The Text of Shelley’s Death (Five Seasons 1995; West House 2001)
-
A Robin Hood Book (West House 1996)
-
Wittgenstein’s Devil: Selected Writing 1978-1998 (Stride 2000; 2nd edn 2002)
-
Sonatas & Preliminary Sketches (Oasis 2000)
-
Dante’s Barber Shop (West House 2001)
-
In Addition: Seventeen Lives of the Poets (La Perruque 2004)
-
Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005)
-
Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2004 (Salt 2005)
-
A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts (Free Poetry 2005) |
What Others Say
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
Links
|
