Half-Life - Softcover

"The best of Michael Hulse's poems remind their readers why poetry should survive."
- Alison Brackenbury, Under the Radar

"These are poems which know that we all have darkness within us, but insist upon a common humanity [...] Half-Life has fine things to say about the imagination"
- William Bedford. Acumen

"Lots to laugh about
Robert Lowell in noting the four musts of oral performance as: 'humour, shock, narrative and a hypnotic voice,' could as easily have been talking about Michael Hulse's eclectic yet cohesive Half-Life, so persistently rich in the first three."
- Belinda Cooke, Stride Magazine

"A powerful collection of characters and moments, stilled for the frieze and sensitive to vulnerability."
- Ian Brinton, Tears in the fence no.59

"The poems in this sequence range from the narrative of the baby in the womb, through a woman discovered hiding in a cupboard probably in Berlin at the end of the war, and discovered by a Red Army soldier whose intentions are not 'honourable', and finishes with Beethoven's late quartets which are seen by the commentator as absolute 'things' 'like a potato or a stone'. Here and elsewhere, Hulse's supreme skill in all this is to guide and hold these narratives so that we trust to his voice and follow his writing through all its twists and turns."
--Ian Pople

Lucid narratives of family dramas, global warming, and conversations with Death make a riveting new collection from this prize-winning poet. The poems swing between Mexico City, New York, the Peloponnese, a Staffordshire village and home - their engagement with the church, art and natural beauty provide sure-footed travelling companions. In an extended sequence, Death relates stories of her encounters with people and culture. This is not to suggest the poems make for comfortable reading: each poem's subject provides an opportunity to challenge and question its integrity. By turns mischievous and assured, this collection becomes more engrossing the more you read.