Falling Through the Music

“Falling Through the Music is a book about high middle age when entropy, mortality, and overall decline cease to be rumor and feel more or less like the beginning of something that, for all its fear and sadness, promises to be fundamentally interesting. The poems range from the personal and familial across cultures and across other boundaries into the affirmations of art. This is the place where the artistic impulse does not save one from falling through music into death and nothingness, but somehow the companionship of art seems to be the best counterbalance to the terrors. Halperin deftly conjoins the mortal fears of advancing age with fears that one inherits through family and history, with the fear that there is really nothing stable or salvific in the world unless it is what we create. And therein resides the greater pleasure of this book—the sense that what is created is all we have and must be treasured for that. In short, this is a book of considerable emotional sophistication and impact.” —Frederick Marchant, Suffolk University, Boston

The mood of Mark Halperin's new poems is autumnal and elegiac, yet the effect of his book is surprisingly bracing. This is due in no small measure to Halperin's persona—he is trustworthy, unflappable, and a wryly unjudgmental observer of human folly. And, as readers of his work have come to know, his command of technique, whether of received form or of the prose poem, is considerable. This makes both his tender poems of family history and his poems drawn from his travels in Russia acts of wonderment.” —David Wojahn

“Mark Halperin’s wry poems are easy to love: what’s “The Trouble with Spring”? It ends. ”Valentine” begins, “Say the heart’s principal industry is worry . . . .” The poet generously believes the great poets of the past no matter their flaws of character and behavior (which he notes); his poems ironically defend lying and the shedding of sincerity (they do, or seem to), and they also notice “for the aristocracy, friend / and servant are so close they seem to blend.” Halperin’s observations, like his syntax, are little surprises, eloquent and fair. “the guilt / without reason of survivors who react / much later, the slide and blank after impact.” (“After the Crash”) The music here—form, rhyme, language and meaning, geometry and identity—is gorgeous: “All I can’t hear gives me trouble now, as the dead do, falling through the music” (“At the Concert”). Here are poems that adhere by sound—of family, memory, loss, and love—all captured by a brilliant poet who teaches as he goes. Lucky readers.” —Hilda Raz, author of Trans and Divine Honors

“Falling Through the Music concerns itself with the mind’s accommodation of ‘gaps’ in time. Both personal and historical memory limit the past’s liabilities. . . . First-time readers of Halperin . . . will return to his work again and again . . . for the benefits of a disciplined imagination, a mature and rigorous skepticism, a breadth of experience that by making modest claims for itself, yields much.” —Notre Dame Review