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Drift & Pulse
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published by Carnegie Mellon 2007
In her third collection, Drift & Pulse, Kathleen Halme is obsessed with "inner forms," and she finds a universe to expose and share in these tightly constructed, charged poems. These poems sing, provide pleasure, poke fun, and nudge around forms with deftness and intelligence.
Her poem, "The Galaxies are Where They Ought to Be," ends with this couplet:
Keep cadence with a rake: brain is to mind as house is to home.
Brain/mind, house/home. Galileo's finger is still shriveled in a dome.It is hard not to read this without a smile, but it is a serious line addressing perception and the movements of the brain.
It is easy to embrace the visceral pleasure of a list of items found "On walks I take to calm my brain," in "To Klickitat and Back," "I've found a black eye patch, a scrapbook / full of postwar baby cards, an eyeglass lens, / a jar of charms, a suede pouch in a bush." It is easy to get lost in her lyric sensibility, "Lemon light, curd of worry. My eye is all iris." (from "Poppy Sleeping), but she won't let us get away as she clarifies, "nothing moves when we lose delight." These poems remain personal without the trap of self-obsession. Halme gives herself to the art, "Do you read me? / All in all, I'm yours." These poems remind that art is about pleasure without neglecting the counter movement of tragedy inevitable in daily life.
— Jeremy Voigt
Kathleen Halme grew up in Wakefield, a post-mining town in Michigan's upper peninsula. She completed her MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Michigan, where her work was awarded the Hopwood Creative Writing Award. Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship in poetry and a National Endowment for the Humanities summer fellowship in anthropology. She lives with her husband in Portland, Oregon.
