The Last Unravellings of the Logoclast
Alan Halsey
“Alan Halsey, much missed, always remembered, cherished here so extraordinarily beautifully by Geraldine Monk with this exquisite little collection with Free Poetry, lives on in the scribbles and the artful verses, moving, stimulating, so effortlessly on the button, every page a spirited wonder.”
— Adam Piette for Blackbox Manifold
Alan Halsey, 1949-2022 ran the Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, U.K. for twenty years and continued to work as a specialist bookseller and editor of West House Books when he moved to Sheffield in 1997. Alan was a poet, artist, publisher, editor, bibliophile, logoclast, scholar and humourist. What was thought to be his final publication Remarks of Uncertain Consequence was published by Five Seasons Press shortly before his death. We now know that it was not his grand finale. Some of his most notable publication amongst his prodigious output include Wittgenstein’s Devil (Stride 2000), Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005), Not Everything Remotely (Salt 2006) and Selected Poems 1988-2016 (Shearsman 2017). Five Seasons also published The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995) and Lives of the Poets with Martin Corless-Smith (2009). He edited the three volume Collected Poems of Bill Griffiths’ (Reality Street) and edited and introduced Thomas Lovell Beddoes Death’s Jest-Book (West House Books 2003). As a graphic artist he collaborated with Kelvin Corcoran, Steve McCaffery and Gavin Selerie; his solo text-graphic works include Memory Screen, shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005, and In White Writing (Xexoxial 2012). With Martin Archer he co-directed and composed pieces for the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices whose third album Warning: May Contain Notes was released on Discus Records in 2016. He was an Affiliated Poet at Sheffield University’s Centre for Poetry and Poetics.
Geraldine Monk’s poetry was first published in the 1970’s. Her major collections include Escafeld Hangings, West House Books (2005) and Interregnum, Creation Books(1995), Selected Poems Salt Publishing (2003) Ghost & Other Sonnets (2008). In 2012 she devised and edited Cusp: Recollections of Poetry in Transition, which she described as a ‘collective autobiography’, Shearsman Books. Her most recent collection They Who Saw the Deep was published in 2016 in the United States by Parlor Press/Free Verse Editions.
She lives in Sheffield, England where she ran West House Books and its imprint Gargoyle Editions with her late husband Alan Halsey. She is a founding member of the Sheffield based antichoir Juxtavoices for which she has composed several pieces including We TalkThrough Walls, Midsummer Mummeries and Up & Down at Bishop’s House (with Alan Halsey and fellow collaborator Martin Archer). She is an affiliated poet to The Centre for Poetry andPoetics, University of Sheffield.
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