Halflife: Poems

by Meghan O'Rourke

"Impressive. A box full of surprises and intense delights."―Billy Collins The insomniac speakers in Halflife are coming of age in a mythical world full of threat and promise. Seeking their true selves amid the fallen cathedrals of America, they speak wryly of destructive love affairs, aesthetic obsession, and encroaching war, but refuse to abandon hope in the power of imagination.

Genres: Poetry

87 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

About the author

Meghan O’Rourke is the author The Long Goodbye: A Memoir (Riverhead Books, 2011), and the poetry collections Once (W. W. Norton, 2011) and Halflife (W. W. Norton, 2007). A former literary editor of Slate and poetry editor of The Paris Review, she has published essays and poems in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Best American Poetry, and other venues. She is the recipient of the 2008 May Sarton Award for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She splits her time between Brooklyn, NY, where she grew up, and Marfa, TX.

Reviews

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

While the five star rating system may have annoyed me for my reviews of prose, it is completely impossible to apply to poetry. What if I feel rather meh about most of the poems and can't forget the rest? Should I average it out to three stars? That seems like a disservice to the ones worthy of five. It's a flawed system.

Some of you poems deserve fives. Some of you, twos. You know which ones you are.

[Darrin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the second book of poetry I have read by Meghan O'Rourke, the first being her most recent, Sun in Days: Poems, which was also a chance pick-up at the library for me. I subsequently read her memoir, The Long Goodbye, about grief and the loss of her mother which is what clinched my somewhat starry-eyed love for Meghan O'Rourke's writings.

Since I completed Halflife in the early part of January, I have gone back and dipped into it a couple of times and revisited a couple of the poems I liked the most. There are a number of them, but, for me, the cycle of poems in section II, titled Still Life Amongst Partial Outlines is one of the best parts of the book.

There are nine poems total, two of which obviously describe the rape of two girls in the woods of Vermont in 1981. One of the girls is murdered and the other girl, who happens to share the same name as the author, Meghan O'Rourke, lived and was able to describe the attackers. O'Rourke writes that for her, reading the newspaper article about this in 1988 was "-a story that could not be forgotten or owned, like looking in a mirror and discovering someone else's face."

Then again, it is possible the whole nine poem cycle is about this incident, the two boys who perpetrated it, the girl who was murdered and the girl who lived. At times I feel some of the poems are autobiographical and that the author's story became intertwined with the earlier one in what became a "There, but for the grace of God, go I." moment for Meghan O'Rourke.

Of all of the poems my personal favorite is VI

When you are a child this is all you have:
rules, mountains, pools, boundaries, magic

that doesn't work. What happened to her
did not happen to you. You were a child,

you were safe, you were not harmed. But
there are fields inside us. They grow.

How do you choose which ones to make room for
under the golden sun, and which ones to lock away.

so that men cannot climb into them at twilight,
vaulting over the iron fence

and landing lightly in the grass?
What happens when you invite what you love

into the field and it will not stay?
Is the grass still green, does it continue to grow like grass?

I can't quite put into words what I understand about this whole cycle of poems. Perhaps, with time and practice, I will be better able to express my insights in a more coherent way.

[DilanAc · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful imagery in these poems - the kind of poems that deserve reading after reading.

[Caitlin Conlon · Rating 3 out of 5]

probably closer to 3.5 stars. truly blown away by the entirety of “still life amongst partial outlines.” a beautiful, twisty, well-constructed poem. the book was worth the read just for that piece.

[Kari Napier · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely some interesting poems.

[chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

She starts a poem called "My Teenage Life" with the line:

I felt "remorse for civilization"

I love her. I love this collection, for its combination of sunshine and radioactive waste (both are, in fact, cancer-causing). The two long selections (sections 2 and 4 of the book) are my favorites, they weave in and out of themes. I read the whole thing cover to cover, for like the fourth time, on a sunny day by the waterfront.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, her work is reminiscent of Plath at times* and this collection is a mite uneven but damn if some of these poems didn't pierce my heart. As the back cover blurbs call out, she's very good at killer last lines. Definitely a poet to watch.


*But, I would add, in the "sincerest form of flattery" way.

[Jenni · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good first book but too many echoes of Plath and Gluck. Especially in the first section of this book -- the Plath influence overpowers the poets own voice. I think she's an interesting writer though, and I would buy her second book.

[Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets]

Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading O'Rourke's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!

[Janée Baugher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another writer/critic with acclaim in prose (Slate, etc.) who writes poems, so I expected flat, ill-crafted poems. However, I was happy to see evidence of the deep-image, interesting diction, imagery, and an argument for the poetic form. I would definitely reread this collection.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yale poetry by a Yalie from Yale (sigh). Verbally interesting, thematically tiresome, stylistically pretentious. Don't bother.

[Em · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 or 5 stars...hmmm, can't quite decide. But I LOVE the poem Inventing a Horse! Beautiful.
Sometimes I just feel like I can see the stitches of her poems, know what I mean?

[Jeremy Allan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading this book was enjoyable, but I mostly found myself thinking: Her future books will be what matter, to me.

[Harry · Rating 3 out of 5]

The poem of hers that first grabbed my attention, the titular poem, was disappointingly, the best. I spent the rest of the collection hoping for something that would move me like that poem.

[Julian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Red pock-pock red and the sea
Yellow up
Yellow down

[Ted Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Giving voice to hunch, making the half-idea a textured, tangible thing, Meghan O'Rourke's poems is a completes sentences we cannot finish ourselves. Precision and morphological accuracy aren't the point, and the words themselves, the images they create or suggest, are more like strands of half remembered music that is heard and triggers an intense rush of association; any number of image fragments, sounds, scents, bits of sentences, suggestions of seasonal light in a certain place, race and parade through the mind as fast as memory can dredge up the shards and let them loose. Just as fast, they are gone again, the source of quick elation or profound sadness gone; one can quite nearly sense that streaming cluster of associations that make up a large part of your existence rush onward, going around a psychic bend, scattering like blown dust in the larger universes of limitless life. All one is left with is memory of the sudden rush, the flash of clarity, and the rapid loss, the denaturing of one's sense of self in a community where one might have assumed they were solid and autonomous in their style of being, that nothing can upset the steady rhythm of a realized life. O'Rourke's poem "Two Sisters" is a ghost story, or at least the attempt to write one; the narrator is struggling to find the words to describe what was lost with the passing of a sibling;

When you left, a world Came.
Rain, A morning, a weather That wouldn't end.
The windows closed like stitches.
Fingernails grew; nothing to pick at.
The tent of our mother's body went Wet around me and clung.
The wind tore through me.
I breathed with two split lungs.
When you left I stayed, I shook!
Like an instrument about To be played by the long,
Liver-yellow Fingers of the sun

One is less autonomous than the myths of hard-centered individuation has us believing; we come from a body into a world full of sensation and assault, we experience ourselves through the presence and shared skin of family, and when there loss, we have an gap in our footing that is never filled, never replaced. O'Rourke's narrator feels the intrusion of a world that had been formerly kept a requisite distance now running riot through her senses. The rain is constant, unending, driving her inside herself from an external existence that is hard, cold, chaotic. The body feels hallowed out, breathing is a chore, a burden, as if taking in breaths for two bodies with one set of lungs--The wind tore through me. I breathed with two split lungs--our narrator is shaking with a profound and only momentarily clear vision of what her relations have been and what they meant in her life. And now that is gone.

When you left I stayed,
I shook! Like an instrument
about To be played by the long,
Liver-yellow Fingers of the sun

A natural storyline emerges, and this is what we use to remember and mourn the passing of a sibling. Because the imagery is fragmented and sudden, and because the associations between them are sudden and only partially outlined, I get the feeling that these are qualities that come in a rush, triggered by some random thing--scent, sound, a phrase, a particular sight--that would cause the mind to briefly erupt with fast, overpowering emotion. It is the indefinite quality that attracts me to O'Rourke's slim poem. Elliptical as the elements are, the style does work at times, if only for a striking image or two; there are times that something affects you and you're able to isolate the reason, or even identify what internal matters a poem, a picture stirred. I don't know precisely what having to breathe with two split lungs means, or what was she was driving toward with the final stanza where she is about to be played by the "long, liver yellow fingers of the sun", but they do suggest a lot. They are perhaps lacking in information, but are rich in what they suggest.This is the art of what was almost said. O'Rourke avoids the requirement of confession to awkwardly confess grief in a long, gasping rant centering not what was revealed, but on what was merely glimpsed, for a moment. There is here a feeling that some profound knowledge had been suddenly bequeathed and just as suddenly removed, and how she gets this feeling is through the minimalism employed. She is crafty about the words used, and where they are placed on the page. In some ways this is less a poem than a totem of some kind.

"Meditations on a Moth" is a sexy, slippery poem about New York at night spoken from the viewpoint of an insomniac dawn patroller who is the midst of an endless argument with herself. It's an interesting marriage of personalities noticeable, appropriately enough, in two poets associated with the New York School, Frank O'Hara and John Ashbery. It gets a sense of the mystery a city nightscape gives to us; every shadow is a primal formation, beasts and monsters and knights vying for the good of the innocent.This has that street level feel O'Hara's best work has, a the vista of a pedestrian walking across congested streets and between buildings, noticing every bit of impacted urban space and detail and the frayed sense of loneliness that permeates everything that glitters and shines and makes noise in the city.

What goes down stays down, the street at three a.m. a fantastic absence of color. Outside the studio window the sound of a river sliding along its dulcimer bed, aquifers and accordions and Alcatraz. This has a the stark clarity of a high contrast black and white photo, and all that's needed is jazz on the background, a set of foot steps coming up the w way , loud as they tread on wet cement, O'Rourke's narrator here is someone who sounds as if they're noticing the small matters of city life against her intentions; things get noticed that would otherwise have remained under the radar.

Here look No, look.
I am trying to rid myself of myself;
to see past the familiar clouds.
All evening drums rumble in the park.
The mafia reconvenes when the cops leave.

This is a micro world where matters are changed forever because they were noticed, noted, given names and assigned places on a mental map of where more things are; they have entered our consciousness. Though far more colloquial than Ashbery has ever been, O'Rourke shares with him (in this piece, at least) an abiding obsession with the unfiltered perception of things and objects of this world, an interest in the phenomenology of the mundane. There is in Moth, as in Ashbery's central (and long) work Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror a musing on what is encountered on the journey the next day, concrete, specific and unadorned details on matters large and small in their seeming exactitude, and then an argument with the perceiving self, a string of associations drawn from personal history or other encounters, a survey of responses to place and things that are finally the meaning a specific place or people's lives can have. The activity here is no less neurotic than what a ritual-locked specter would suffer from. This wonderfully condensed musing on what over-alert senses bring to you on dark, wet nights comes from the sort of agitation of the soul that is too familiar with the terrain, and one finds themselves wrestling with ambivalence, to make the move to new climes, or to look further and harder at where one has been for years, seeking another nuance of light or angle of skyline that rewards the soul just a little more than the agony of not changing punishes it. I like the Robert Stroud reference, and my guess is that this is something going through O'Rourke's mind when she wrote this. Fortunately, she left the reference oblique and mysterious, and let the vaguely evocative syllables give the poem's musicality just a passing clang of dissonance. She resembles another poet, Elizabeth Bishop, for her skill at keeping the inner workings of mind private in a public sphere. Suffice to say that I think O'Rourke, in this poem, has composed a verse as good as the writers I've mentioned already, less because she meets their standards or thinks as they do, but more with equaling in originality, style and mastery of technique and material.

It's a rare event when a poet can write in a surrealistic mode and not have it read like a studied classroom assignment to mimic a past master, or a stiff parody of a style whose signifiers are lost on contemporary audiences, yet O'Rourke's mastery accomplishes just that, a fresh set of images in arresting, nerve rattling stanzas. "Descent", prefaced with "After Apollinaire", gets the pulverizing velocity of a drug addict's degradation.

"Descent"
after Apollinaire

I was born a bastard in an amphetamine spree,
lit through with a mother's quickenings,
and I burrowed into her, afraid she would not have me,
and she would not have me,
I dropped out down below the knees
of a rickrack halterdress, sheeted,
tented knees, water breaking, linoleum peeling,
and no one there to see but me,
I woke on the floor as if meant to put her back together,
to try to hold on to her
like a crate to a river, as if I'd been shipped down
to stand straight while
in the misgiving
she said I had a dream of thirty-six sticks floating down a river and a dog who couldn't swim and I could not swim,
I slipped from her grip in a room
where two orange cats stared like tidy strangers
at a world of larger strangeness,
and I had no name.
I was there at her breast
and I thought I could see her,
the swag of her hair, the jaw,
the fearing, but I barely saw,
I went sliding down the river from a house
in which it was sweet to sleep
and the cool of the sheets was never cool enough,
the imprint of the bedded bodies two geese diving at once.

"Descent " is an update of the myth of dead souls crossing the river Styx, lovingly and pun-fully alluded to ("she said I had a dream of thirty-six sticks /floating down a river and a dog who couldn't swim/and I could not swim, I slipped from her grip/in a room where two orange cats stared like tidy strangers/at a world of larger strangeness,/and I had no name")This is also an expanding of the Rolling Stone's "Jumpin' Jack Flash", Mick Jagger's succinct catalog of hard knocks, fights, poverty and gleeful nihilism fleshed out into a jittery, theatricalized speech. There is the danger that some would take this poem as glorifying the speed freak's life of curbstone squalor, but there is an element of this debacle that attracts us all, users and those who would condemn it, and O'Rourke, less presenting this as romanticized diorama where each broken brick and bit of torn blue jean is studiously arranged than as a mis-en-scene that gets the feeling of the rush.
Reply to this post

[Kyle Schnitzer · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Anatomy of Failure” is a really great poem. Didn't really understand why there were five different sections, two in which the poems just seemed out of place. That said, some really great poems in here and I'm looking forward to reading more of O'Rourke's work.

[M · Rating 3 out of 5]

But
there are fields inside us. They grow.

[Colombe Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerfully written poetry stringing together images to represent emotions in a beautiful way

[Kathie · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's good to pick up a poetry book occasionally, even for someone thoroughly grounded in the here and now. The poet's use of language forces the reader to abandon convention and let the mind fly free, just a bit. That's a good exercise for any reader.

I picked up this book because I enjoy Meghan O'Rourke's Slate book podcasts. She's enjoyed a good deal of early success and it will be interesting to watch Ms. O'Rourke as she matures and mellows with the years.

My favorite lines, from VIII. The Lost Sister:

In her life, the hours pass casually.
Snow continues to pile on snow,
the dust in the corners of the old farm house
grows like mice in winter.
I, I was the snow that fell too soon,
before the ground had frozen enough to catch me
and make me stick.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the things I'm most interested in lately is how a book of poems animates itself around some central event, some reason for their having been written. With some books, like Susan Stewart's Yellow Stars and Ice, the force of the poet's investigation is enough. In O'Rourke's book, my suspicion is that some violent event from her childhood is at the center of the poems, but she puts such distance between herself and this event that I don't know whether to believe it happened to her or some other girl who happened to share her name. This distance makes me feel less commitment in the book, and pushes me away as a reader.

[M.B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really liked a lot of the poems in this book. They're skilful and striking. Vacillated between giving this book a 3 or a 4. Settled on 3 because some things in one or two of the poems seemed a little inevitable. Just a bit. BUT I think O'Rourke is very talented. Favourite poems: 'Descent', 'Halflife', 'A Further Sea', 'Epitaph for Mother and Child', 'The Lighthouse Keeper', 'Thermopylae', 'Signal Fires', and 'Pilgrim's Progress'.

[Brooks · Rating 2 out of 5]

This never clicked. I thought it would, the language was excellent, the images were interesting, it just never got to that one poem that hit me between the eyes. Instead I got a general mood of threat and malice that never coalesced.

I would probably read more of her poems, just because there were lines or phrases that I enjoyed, but this collection didn't quite get as far as I hoped it would go.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

This slender debut book of poems was quite heavy on metaphor usage. I re-read some of the poems on subsequent days after reading the whole thing through, and only then did some of them have some value/meaning. However, I am also still a novice in the area of poetry, which is why I like Roger Housden's collections in which he includes commentary.

[Abraham · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is one of those books that you sit down and pleasurably read from beginning to end if you have a quiet space in which to do so. Most of the book was just okay, tending toward a kind of safe tangentiality in lieu of direct intimacy. The first long poem, however, is fantastic, working with metaphor in a deeply effective way.

[Terry Heller]

The poems in this book are really good. I don't really know how to review a book of poetry, because its a collection instead of a single whole, and you can't really sit down and read a book of poems, which are meant to be analyzed and chewed-over, in the way that you can a novel or a history book. But I'm glad I read it.

[Brendan]

Rating: None. Somewhere in the 3 - 4 range though.

A lot of lines that were almost noteworthy, poems that were just out of reach of their potential. This is a collection I should probably revisit - in a different mood, at a different pace.

My favorite pieces:

"Elegy"
Section III of "Still Life Among Partial Outlines"
"Anatomy of Failure"

[Jeff Streeby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning language.
Resonant figures.
Each particle is like a Picasso serigraph.

A favorite so far is "Hunt." I will begin again from the beginning in an attempt to comprehend the book's devices, sequences and movements.

[Emily · Rating 3 out of 5]

what a strange mix between beauty and grotesque. i liked the first and last sections much better than the epic crap in the middle.

[Lorien · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful, fierce little poems. My favorite was "Descent."