Half-Life

Michael Hulse

• Publisher: Arc Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781908376213
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

Half-Life is a riveting new collection full of family dramas, global warming and conversations with Death. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home, engaging with the various beauties to be found in art, nature and the church. Then, in an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with the world's peoples and cultures.

"He writes with a controlled passion... using sophisticated effects to locate the significant and develop its larger emotional truth."
John Levett

"Compelling and moving."
Poetry Review on The Secret History Michael Hulse was born in 1955 in England, and lived for 25 years in Germany before returning in 2002 to teach at the University of Warwick. His poetry has won the National Poetry Competition and the Bridport Poetry Prize (twice), as well as Eric Gregory and Cholmondeley Awards. His most publications are the poetry collection The Secret History (Arc, 2009) and a translation of Rainer Maria Rilke's novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Penguin Classics, 2009). He co-edited The New Poetry, the bestselling Bloodaxe anthology and GCSE set text (1993), and the Ebury anthology The 20th Century in Poetry (2011). He lives in Stafford.

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Foreknowledge Absolute

I

What a swell party this is.

– I’m sorry, I don’t think we’ve met?

Her smile is the melt of a snowflake in hell.

Her eyes are the burn everlasting.

The starlight at her ears and throat

had ceased to be before I noticed it.

She’s wearing the new black. Her heels are like ice-picks.

Her skirt is of charcoal and ash. Her talk

is of body parts hung in the trees,

arms in the branches, a torso, a head impaled –

I was there, I saw it. She speaks of a truth

within all of the higgledy-piggledy relative anything-goes of truths,

the need to know your way through to the absolute.

Next July we collide with Mars. Call me Death, she says.

II

Sometimes I think I remember the start of it all,

she says (we are telling each other about our lives) –

that sense of having followed someone or something

truly preposterous, inconceivable, into an unknown place,

that sense of having fallen

a very long way down, a very long way down indeed,

down what you might call a wormhole (there’s more

in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your metrics).

On the way down I snatched from a passing shelf

a volume of Classical and Quantum Gravity

and read up quickly on what I thought or imagined was happening to me

and only stopped when a footnote cited the Summa Theologica

at which point, overcoming the fear

of killing someone, I dropped the book.

Whenever I think I remember the start of it all

what comes to mind is that seemingly endless fall,

the archives of the obsolete, the libraries of vanished thought,

the empty begging-bowls of past and present and to come –

I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs,

I said to myself (says Death). Have you been listening to a word I’ve said?

– The Quantum Theologica?

– Don’t be facetious. – Do that agai...

Table of contents

• Beginning
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• I
• Freeman
• II
• The Return
• The Syrian Bride
• A Carcass
• In Sant’ Antonio di Padua
• Saskatoon
• Home
• Burj Khalifa
• Lagerfeld
• Wewelsfleth
• In the Peloponnese
• After the Warming
• From the Virtual Jerusalem
• Swiss National Day in Lavigny
• Rousseau in Staffordshire
• To Thine Own Self Be True
• Arse over Tip
• Quod Scripsi Scripsi
• A Virgin in Mexico City
• The Half-Life of Jesus
• The Swallows
• Eh, Tom?
• III
• Foreknowledge Absolute
• IV
• The Truth of Fiction (I)
• The Truth of Fiction (II)
• Author’s Note
• Biographical Note
• Selected titles in Arc Publications’ Poetry from the UK/Ireland