M. B. Halbeck

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Miles Bagshaw Halbeck (1936–1989) was a British poet, born in Alnwick, Northumberland, who spent most of his working life as a piano tuner. Halbeck's early influences include Charles Olson and Donald Davie. His first book, Pipeworks, was published in 1966. This was followed by a sequence of works which secured his reputation as one of England's most distinctive poetic voices: Stoat Bangles (1971), Gazebo (1977) and Felt Tip Hens (1984). His Collected Poems appeared a month before his death in a piano tuning accident in 1989. Despite its wit and pleasure in wordplay and neologism, Halbeck's oeuvre is possessed of an unnerving melancholia.

Halbeck was a somewhat isolated figure who remained outside the major British poetical movements and groups of the second half of the twentieth century, although he was an active lifelong member of the Newbiggin Allotment Association.

[edit] Bibliography

• Pipeworks (1966)
• Stoat Bangles (1971)
• Gazebo (1977)
• Felt Tip Hens (1984)

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