UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "Rumors of the Turning Wheel" by A. Halley

Anne Halley

A new volume of poetry from the author of The Bearded Mother and Between Wars and Other Poems

The title of this powerful collection refers to the wheel of fortune. In a time long before television game shows, a wood and wire crank-driven mechanism would be set up and turned by hand at fairs and carnivals, next to the puppet-show booth, the pot and pan vendors, and the horse-drawn carousel. Country folk and children watched to see where the turning wheel would stop and if their folded paper "chance" might reveal the lucky number that won a prize.

The wheel turns more noisily, portentously, and can take on disguised or secret forms when Fortuna concerns herself with the fate of rulers and nations. Rumors of all kinds will be heard as the wheel's turnings stir the air. Rumors of war, of course, strange births, rape, the collapse of powerful houses and incestuous loves, always the rumor of impending death, sometimes a rumor of survivals and, often, one of hope for the children. These rumors were gathered on the sidelines and in the market squares during the last—the catastrophic twentieth—century, and they form the starting point for this memorable collection.

"Halley's poems speak with a voice that is haunting yet precise, intelligent, even wise. In her finely honed images we catch the gleam of history, which is all around us and always alive. These poems have much to teach us, and we would do well to learn."

Martín Espada
"Halley writes a page-turning volume of poems, everyday life turned eerily into the stuff of dreams. These are poems of movement, of coming, of becoming, and of metamorphosis. With her, we are caught in or escaping from Leda's swan, from the Holocaust, from various 'rumors' of disaster. We are experiencing a world of 'necessary troubles,' some real, some phantasmagoric. Halley's humor is sly, wry, on the edge of comedy, her language clear, direct, and memorable: 'We are / each other's witnesses.' As soon as I finished the volume, I wanted to begin again."

Florence Howe
"This is an extraordinary book. Anne Halley writes with a fine fierce intelligence in language that is subtle and evocative, often breathtaking. Many of these powerful poems carry us back and forth between Europe and the U.S., and bear witness to incidents and behavior of people on the uneasy edge of war."

Jan Conn
"Halley's poems are unlike any I can think of. They are disquieting and enlivening and wonderfully challenging in their fierceness. They come at their subjects from odd angles, sometimes sinister, when personal and public history intersect, sometimes simply rich in affection. But if memory is both the blight and the salve of this poet who dares to face her ghosts and those of a wretched century, for the reader there is a single thing that binds these quickly changing moods—their extraordinary language."

Rosellen Brown

Anne Halley lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, and is a poetry editor of The Massachusetts Review.

Poetry
96 pp.
$16.95t paper, ISBN 978-1-55849-400-8
April 2003
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