Alan Halsey – författare

In Rampant Inertia Alan Halsey, identified by Tony Lopez as a 'normally secret and invisible language spy', is found going about his familiar business, dismantling the rhetoric of Austerity while tracking scientific and other uncertainties, rereading Burton in the light of the Arab Spring, miming Our Mutual Friend, transcribing a racehorse's gossip, mapping the bricked-up public toilets of Sheffield, tapping Lewis and Clark's conversation in the Lost Trail Pass or fitfully failing to translate Aretino's erotica. Is 'Baa baa black sheep' a political poem? He thinks so. Rampant Inertia completes a trilogy of books, following Term as in Aftermath (Ahadada 2009) and Even if only out of (Veer 2011) although it may be the third in a tetralogy. Selections from Halsey's earlier work appeared in Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989), Wittgenstein's Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005) and Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006).

Selected Poems 1988-2016 focuses on Alan Halsey's longer poems from the period and brings together the previously scattered sequences Ars Poetica, Tracks & Tracts of the Lizopard, A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts and Latin for Today: The Sequel. It includes some revised and expanded texts such as the John Dee libretto Loagaeth alongside poems written since Rampant Inertia, published by Shearsman in 2014.

Poets Kelvin Corcoran and Alan Halsey have often collaborated. In the past this brought us Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (West House 2001), A Horse That Runs: To & Fro with Wallace Stevens (Constitutional Information 2015), and Winterreisen (Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2019).