Live Encounters Books-Reviews Volume Seven
November- December 2025
Shy White Tiger by Richard W Halperin
Salmon Poetry, June 2013
Mr Halperin’s work is part of University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. All of his collections deal with love, death, shock, and hope. Shy White Tiger is the second of Mr. Halperin’s four books to-date for Salmon Poetry/Cliffs of Moher; there will be a fifth in autumn 2025: All the Tattered Stars: Selected and New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods. Shorter collections, eighteen to date – are published by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert. Mr Halperin chose Shy White Tiger for this issue because of the Endorser: the late legendary Irish poet Macdara Woods, who wrote a 265-word appreciation for the back-cover. A short excerpt of this (see below) was published by Barbara Dordi in The French Literary Review, No. 20, page 49.
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These marvellously accomplished new-mint poems, as with those of his recent first collection, Anniversary, insist that ‘To try to change in the mind what happened/Is to block transfiguration.’ Richard Halperin must have lodged for a time with the sea-charts in the map-room of one of Calvino’s Invisible Cities; he deals so adroitly with any possible misunderstandings between the poem as it unfolds and the strange particulars from which it is unfolding.
— Macdara Woods
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (four collections) and by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert (eighteen shorter collections). In 2025-26 Salmon will bring out All the Tattered Stars: New and Selected Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods. Many videos of Mr Halperin’s readings in Ireland are on the internet (e.g., Achill Island; Limerick; University College Dublin Irish Poetry Reading Archive).