Halflife: Poems

by Meghan O'Rourke

Book Overview

The insomniac speakers in "Halflife" are coming of age in a mythical world full of threat and promise. Seeking their true selves amid the fallen cathedrals of America, they speak wryly of destructive love affairs, aesthetic obsession, and encroaching war, but refuse to abandon hope in the power of imagination.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393064751
• ISBN13: 9780393064759
• Release Date: April 2007
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.7" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

"In the attic I sleep in a swallowing heat."

I found this collection quite arresting at first read. From one poem to the next, I was in turn startled, bemused, surprised, sliding through a landscape as changeable as moods, an unforgettable coupling of words that meet like strangers on a train step off at the next stop, lost to the night. Insomniac, I am at the heart of a vital, dirty city, where eccentric travel circuitous routes before the abrupt busyness of morning: "and children peel up into the supplejack twilight like licorice from sticky floors- there a black-eyed straight-backed drag queen preens, fusses, fixes her hair in a shop window on Prince. .... In the window the moon is a dented spoon, cold, getting colder, so hurry sleep, come creep into bed..." (Sleep) Out there, in the night, the city is restless, more flagrant in its excesses, brief snapshots of the distractions that await on every corner, the dark a shield against indiscretion: "Token in the slot... A figure in the darkness. The tine crank Of canned do-wop. .... come quick, no time for this, the girls in thongs are glancing at the clock." (Peep Show) Skimming from one provocative adventure to another, I stop, halted by a narrative with horror at its heart, a betrayal of innocence. I read, but reluctant, my mind skittering away; calm, relentless, she continues, seducing me with images as I stare, speechless: "-a story that could not be forgotten or owned, like looking in a mirror and discovering someone else's face. .... What happened to her Did not happen to you. You were a child you were safe, not harmed. But there are fields inside us. They grow. .... One takes out a knife and one takes out a rope. It's a tired old truth, that death comes to each the same, to each alone- " (Still Life Amongst Partial Outlines) Such mastery of language is akin to hearing a symphony for the first time, the dance of unexpected notes, raucous, joyful and infused with energy: "So this is happiness: a flaxen, spoiling moon; blindfolds; teasing; catastrophic fantasies. I do not like the sound of bedclothes sliding to the wax-slick floor, I do not like your body elsewhere, and I do not like love, that narrow street" (Late Mastery) A spectacular journey through images and impressions, the vitality of this collection is palpable, a brisk mind in an urban environment, seizing, sampling, ever curious and engaged. Luan Gaines/ 2008.

Fore

It's hard to believe this is a debut. The imagery (shadows, geese, etc.) really take shape in this book, never mind, the real situations of the protagonist in some of these poems. All of the poems are very colorful & alive & the paperback version is well-done.

Superb

Meghan O'Rourke,poetry editor for The Paris Review and a cultural editor for Slate,is also a poet with unique ability to get a nearly intangible notion, an inexlicapable sensation into words. Giving voice to hunch, making the half-idea a textured, tangible thing, hers is a poetry that completes sentences we cannot finish ourselves. Precision and morphological accuracy aren't the point, and the words themselves, the images they create or suggest, are more like strands of half remembered music that is heard and triggers an intense rush of association; any number of image fragments, sounds, scents, bits of sentences, suggestions of seasonal light in a certain place, race and parade through the mind as fast as memory can dredge up the shards and let them loose. Just as fast, they are gone again, the source of quick elation or profound sadness gone; one can quite nearly sense that streaming cluster of associations that make up a large part of your existence rush onward, going around a psychic bend, scattering like blown dust in the larger universes of limitless life. All one is left with is memory of the sudden rush, the flash of clarity, and the rapid loss, the denaturing of one's sense of self in a community where one might have assumed they were solid and autonomous in their style of being, that nothing can upset the steady rhythm of a realized life. O'Rourke's poem "Two Sisters" is a ghost story, or at least the attempt to write one; the narrator is struggling to find the words to describe what was lost with the passing of a sibling; When you left, a world Came. Rain, A morning, a weather That wouldn't end. The windows closed like stitches. Fingernails grew; nothing to pick at. The tent of our mother's body went Wet around me and clung. The wind tore through me. I breathed with two split lungs. When you left I stayed, I shook! Like an instrument about To be played by the long, Liver-yellow Fingers of the sun One is less autonomous than the myths of hard-centered individuation has us believing; we come from a body into a world full of sensation and assault, we experience ourselves through the presence and shared skin of family, and when there loss, we have an gap in our footing that is never filled, never replaced. O'Rourke's narrator feels the intrusion of a world that had been formerly kept a requisite distance now running riot through her senses. The rain is constant, unending, driving her inside herself from an external existence that is hard, cold, chaotic. The body feels hallowed out, breathing is a chore, a burden, as if taking in breaths for two bodies with one set of lungs--The wind tore through me. I breathed with two split lungs--our narrator is shaking with a profound and only momentarily clear vision of what her relations have been and what they meant in her life. And now that is gone. When you left I stayed, I shook! Like an instrument about To be played by the long, Liver-yellow Fingers of the sun A natural storyline