Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2004

Not Everything Remotely is the widest-ranging gathering of Halsey's poems to date. Some have not previously been published while many appeared in fugitive editions and collections now out of print. It brings together poems which slowly developed into broadly-related sequences such as the verse-letters begun in 1979 as communiques from the Welsh border and continued into the '90s tracking the savageries of the Thatcher years. It also collects his emblem' poems, in which traditional devices are reworked within the modernist perspective; these and other short poems veer between political epigram and an Ars Poetica. Of his recent work there is a selection from the sequence in progress A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts. Halsey's poems often draw on familiar forms of discourse such as the financial, philosophical and journalistic, set alongside the specialist and marginal vocabularies used in such studies as linguistics, ufology and the paranormal; they may or may not be a satire which is enactedin the absence of a validated hierarchy of discourse' (Tim Woods).