TRAVELING ON CREDIT

by Daniel Halpern ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 1972

Halpern speaks for his generation in cool, easy-going poems about the rites of growing up in postwar America and the myth of the alternative East. He doesn't mention the political disillusionments of the '60's. He doesn't need to: it's clear from his wistfully funny recollection of teen culture that the lost innocence in this case was a blissful social unawareness; and the point of the unglamorized, passively receptive travel poems is just as clearly an ideal of social harmony. Not that there's anything so abstract in the work itself. Halpern's mode, again typically, is experiential, visual, taking in the scenes and giving them back with only the gentlest apparent mediation. His craft lies in the selection and sharpening of common essentials (as in a bus station where ""Time is porcelain on the wall""), which he does very well; and the force, even in his more confessional and metaphysical moments, is drawn from a collective experience. New York's YMHA chose him for its Discovery Award for 1971

Pub Date: Oct. 11, 1972

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1972

Categories: NONFICTION