Some error occured while loading the Quick View. Please close the Quick View and try reloading the page.
In Falling Through the Music, his fifth major book of poetry, Mark Halperin gives us consolation, guidance, and companionship while delivering an accomplished meditation on the first real glimpses of the limits on a life. Displaying an agility of formal invention—he moves easily from a Whitmanesque and witty litany to rhymed quatrains—Halperin deftly melds technique to theme. As in “Someone Pausing, he is able to place us in the mind of someone—any one of us—who has stood on an island in the street, fully attentive and present, knowing nothing stays, not even the observer.
“Falling Through the Music concerns itself with the mind’s accommodation of ‘gaps’ in time. Both personal and historical memory limit the past’s liabilities. . . . First-time readers of Halperin . . . will return to his work again and again . . . for the benefits of a disciplined imagination, a mature and rigorous skepticism, a breadth of experience that by making modest claims for itself, yields much.” —Notre Dame Review
Mark Halperin taught at Central Washington University and has taught in Japan, Estonia, Russia, and Ukraine. His poetry books have been published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Wesleyan University Press, and Copper Canyon Press. His poems and translations have appeared in a variety of journals. Halperin lives outside of Ellensburg, Washington, near the Yakima River.