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"Most prominent is Halme's sensual commitment to language; her poems resonate with a phonetic lushness illuminating her intelligent imagery. These poems are enjoyable most notably for the pleasure of pure sound. . . . Gently peppered into her poems are flavors of mysticism, portrayed by an efficient and clever selection of words, which result in a pleasurable and unexpected unfolding. Overall, these poems read as a collection of finely crafted work . . . Halme writes as a sculptor who honors the essence of unformed stone and the core of her poems."
—ForeWord
"In Halme's straightforward second book of poetry, the female protagonist lives on the North Carolina coast and experiences rapture, beauty, and an occasional edginess. . . . Life seems easy in these poems as anxiety is subsumed by physical beauty. This is a good book to escape with. . . . For general
collections."
—Library Journal
"Seemingly on an extended, coastal vacation with her ‘polite Southern husband,’ Halme uses her moments of repose to both deflate and celebrate bourgeois life, where ‘a whalish blimp chubs by / to tell us where to eat tonight.’ Her graceful, self-aware lines well capture ‘full beauty / in moments, in flashes,’ particularly in ‘When the Sea Laughed Itself into a Foam,’ an eerie, near-sestina on seeing a new house overcome by the sea. . . . Pithy, entertaining riffs on adult life are Halme’s forte, and there are plenty of them here."
—Publishers Weekly
In Equipoise, her second book of poems, Kathleen Halme delivers an irresistible erotics of ocean. Based in fact on the North Carolina coastline, the climate of these poems is one abundant with sun, salt water, and the paradoxical shore. Halme's lyric ruminations are remarkable examples of a mind sublimely rooted in the physical world: "Consider how infinite / I was, walking every inch / of that orchid shaped island: // no jangled thoughts, I knew / only elegances. . . . ("Lilies Showering Down"). Equally at home in formal meter and free verse, Halme explores the balancing pull of forces and discovers a multitude of reciprocities and affinities between matter and spirit.
Halme accepts consciousness with obvious pleasure: " ‘Are you not a lucky one / you who hear your own mind think.'" But here is an intellect made lyrical. To celebrate the sensual core of experience, Halme's seemingly spare language is lush with assonance. In these poems, vowels have a cumulative effect, resounding, finally, in a grandiose vocative o of astonishment and joy.
Equipoise offers a refreshing version of mindfulness in daily life. Halme braves happiness despite contemporary trends of cynicism and despair. Even as she acknowledges that "We all live in fear / of shoreless feelings," such anxiety succumbs to her inclusive vision: "We are in the soup, singular / and swimming, roiling / with the isopods and copepods. / . . . We are delicious, surrendered to shells and jellies, / every one soaking in sun."
For readers eager to experience "the ache of paradise," these poems chart an archipelago of consciousness.
Kathleen Halme’s first book of poetry, Every Substance Clothed, winner of the 1995 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series competition, was awarded the Balcones Poetry Prize. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing award. Halme is a 1997-98 recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. She is associate professor of English at Western Washington University in Bellingham.
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