Air - by Daniel Halpern (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Daniel Halpern's Air seeks to confront, understand, and intermingle with the world, exploring solitude, memory, and the pleasures of being human.

Cinematic, nostalgic, and unabashedly raw, Daniel Halpern's tenth collection, Air, hungers for the entirety of human experience. A mythic quotidian is recounted through rich and often confessional exposition: the love of a father for his daughter, of dear people and places, of curious insects and birds. Musing unapologetically on themes intimate and wistful, Halpern writes to French actresses, old lovers, a pot of stew, insomnia, and to friends past and present, sharing lessons of the literary world. As he reminisces on once-realities and questions his own observations--the duplicity of memory--these poems transcend form, the world presenting itself anew. Halpern is a literary icon, and in Air he proves that poetry is quite literally all around us.

Review Quotes

Praise for Air

"Like a boat "drifting back at sunset," Daniel Halpern's Air brings together lyrics and prose portraits composed in a world made only of time. Driven by the love of language, passions, a timeframe, Air holds vanished intimacies, remembered tastes, recalled scents, and strivings. These exquisite poems and recollections loosely pull back together a literary life. Time passes in these poems with the ease of breath, in the scent of clementines, where the domestic anchors alongside meals, company, and the flirtation of words. . . . Halpern offers not just lyrics holding moments in time, sometimes at dawn and sometimes at the ending of things, but also lingering glimpses into the lives of artists, writers, patrons, and poets. The logic and beauty of Air is that time is never judged, only reassembled in the symphony called life."--Claudia Rankine

"What does a poet who has done so much in poetry do in poems at this point? Daniel Halpern gives us one great answer: He continues to write out of witness rooted in memory's buried treasures and elegies, full of seeds still flowering. Halpern remains as romantic, reflective, and restless as his New York noir-ish book cover. He travels, he risks, he dances, he estranges. Poems refracted through lyric, urbane, cosmopolitan lenses. Air records what cannot be replicated by machine and screen, only embodied, dreamed. This remarkable new collection exemplifies what it means to live, love, and marvel in poetry."--Terrance Hayes

"Crystalline, erudite, and full of deep feeling, Halpern's latest is the sum total of a life spent living, breathing, and flourishing poetry--and the result is an ever-evolving voice, not just sterling, but wrought from a deep love for the art itself. A true feast."--Ocean Vuong

"I've always thought of [Daniel Halpern] as a poet on the model of the Roman poet Horace, with a poised and immensely civilized mind for the life we live, its large and small panics and decorums, and a civilized balance in his verse, in which orderliness can sometimes seem sinister or wry, and sometimes seem a gift of the kind we can give to one another, like a well-set table."--Robert Hass, Washington Post

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 somehow 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 poet's 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.