Issue 29: Alan Halsey

Dear Geraldine

You asked me once to ask

absent friends to send birthday presents

of favourite poems

& I would if I could

row Kathleen Ferrier home over Lethe

to sing to the lute of Ben Jonson

Hast’ou seen but a whyte lillie grow

Hast’ou felt swansdown ever

[Alan Halsey was born in London. He ran The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979-96 and moved to Sheffield in 1997, continuing to work as a specialist bookseller and as editor of West House Books. His major publications include Five Years Out (1989), The Text of Shelley’s Death (1995), A Robin Hood Book (1996) and Wittgenstein’s Devil (2000). He has written several short studies of Thomas Lovell Beddoes and re-edited his Death’s Jest-Book in 2003. Alan died in October 2022.]

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