Alan Halsey

Alan Halsey (born 1949) is an English poet.

Life and career
He managed The Poetry Bookshop in Hay-on-Wye from 1979 to 1997. Since 1997, Halsey has lived in Sheffield, working as a specialist bookseller and publishing West House Books.

Alan Halsey founded West House Books in 1994 to publish contemporary poetry and poetry-related work. In recent years, he has managed it in partnership with his wife, the British poet Geraldine Monk.

Alan Halsey's collection of poems include Five Years Out (1989), Wittgenstein's Devil (2000), Marginalien (2005) and Not Everything Remotely (2006). In addition, his prose works include The Text of Shelley's Death (1995) and A Robin Hood Book (1996). Among his collaborative works are Fit to Print with Karen Mac Cormack (1998), Days of '49 with Gavin Selerie (1999) and Quaoar with Ralph Hawkins and Kelvin Corcoran (2006). He is the author of several essays on Thomas Lovell Beddoes and the editor of the later version of Beddoes' Death's Jest-Book (2003). His graphics have been widely published and he is the illustrator of several books including Kelvin Corcoran's Your Thinking Tracts or Nations (2001) and Gavin Selerie's Le Fanu's Ghost (2006). Halsey's text-graphic work Memory Screen was shown at the Bury Text Festival in 2005.

Publications

 * Yearspace (Galloping Dog 1979)
 * Present State (Spectacular Diseases 1981)
 * Perspectives on the Reach (Galloping Dog 1981)
 * Auto Dada Cafe (Five Seasons 1987)
 * Five Years Out (Galloping Dog 1989)
 * Reasonable Distance (Equipage 1992)
 * The Text of Shelley’s Death (Five Seasons 1995; West House 2001)
 * A Robin Hood Book (West House 1996)
 * Wittgenstein’s Devil: Selected Writing 1978-1998 (Stride 2000; 2nd edn 2002)
 * Sonatas & Preliminary Sketches (Oasis 2000)
 * Dante’s Barber Shop (West House 2001)
 * In Addition: Seventeen Lives of the Poets (La Perruque 2004)
 * Marginalien (Five Seasons 2005)
 * A Looking-Glass for Logoclasts (Free Poetry 2005)
 * Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005 (Salt 2006)