Richard W. Halperin holds U.S.-Irish dual nationality and lives in Paris. On 1 November 2025, Salmon Poetry/Cliffs of Moher brought out All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, which showcases 92 poems published by Salmon and by Lapwing/Belfast since 2010 and 26 new poems. On 7 January 2026, Mr Halperin was Special Guest Reader in the First Wednesday Poetry and Open-Mic Series, White House Bar, Limerick; the reading is now on YouTube.

Where the Word for Beautiful

A poem by Joseph Woods
in his Sailing to Hokkaido
first brought it to my attention:
‘Where the word for beautiful is clean.’
Snow. Some air. Some art.
Some thoughts or acts.

I think of this this terrible morning.
I listen to Vaughan Williams’
Mass in G Minor, Choir of
St. John’s College, Cambridge.

I once heard Victoria de los Angeles
sing Vaughan Willams songs
at Carnegie Hall.

You could have heard a pin drop.
Even God drops pins.

I think of some friends or some strangers
who did what I sometimes had wanted to do
but couldn’t or didn’t.
It would have made a difference.

I am glad, now, to realise I had thought
of doing it. Had I done it, I would have been
where the word for beautiful is clean.

Private Souls

I write from an abbey in Ireland.
The guests – I am a guest – are
in this community provisionally.
We are not, ourselves, a community.
We are private souls. Of course
the abbey’s members are also
private souls, but it is not about
them that I write. I write about us.
Which means, I write about myself.

I have brought along Eiléan
Ní Chuilleanáin’s The Map of
the World. I think of a poem in it,
‘The Miracles’ and the phrase ‘Fear,
which is everywhere, pushed back.’
Fear does push back.

I see that in Jesus in Gethsemane
while he prays, still not knowing –
at all – if his Father will help him.

I see it in the faces of some of
the guests.

I see in in the face of my friend
Betty A. Reardon the peacemaker
when she was on this earth.

Fear pushing back.

Spilled

‘But I’ve come back daddy,/I’d even speak to you
if I could . . . .’
Jessie Lendennie, ‘Father,’ Daughter & Other Poems

Poetry is remarks, even Paradise Lost
is remarks. That said, the poetry I like best –
Jessie’s, Joe’s – resembles remarks,
something I myself can’t do. I can
spill words on a page, bringing them
out of the gunk and into the light,
but there it stops.

A woman who is also a girl, everything
is mixed, addresses her dead father,
as I sometimes address mine,
maybe because conversations with
one’s father when alive were always
unfinished or never said. Unfinished
or never said, poems are that.

A Poem for Betty Reardon

‘Upon the breathless starlit air/Upon the star
that marks the hidden pole . . . . ‘
– Yeats, words of the Soul in ‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’

Do things revolve – everything –
around a hidden pole? As I read
the Soul’s words, I think so,
I feel so. I think without transition
of my friend Betty A. Reardon
who wrote me when she was
in palliative care, ‘I want to go
gentle into that good night.’
She did. All the suffering in what
for her was a cheerful life, gone.
All the great ones – she was great;
a peacemaker – work out of suffering.
They know the value of compassion.
All her jokes – she was an endless
source of them, I remember all
of them – where are they now? In
heaven. Where jokes come from.
Where she is now. This is my poem:
where she is now. I think so,
I feel so. Everything revolving
around a hidden pole. She loved
to dance. That is what Yeats
has done for me this night.