Search results for ""author mark halliday""
The University of Chicago Press Losers Dream on
We are all losing all the time. Four titanic forces--time, mortality, forgetting, and confusion--win victories over us each day. We all "know" this yet we keep dreaming of beautiful fulfillments, shapely culminations, devotions nobly sustained--in family life, in romance, in work, in citizenship. What obsesses Halliday in Losers Dream On is how to recognize reality without relinquishing the pleasure and creativity and courage of our dreaming. Halliday's poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves). Often Halliday gives a poem to a speaker who is distressed, angry, confused, defensive, self-excusing, or driven by yearning, so that the poem may dramatize the speaker's state of mind while also implying the poet's ironic perspective on the speaker. Meanwhile, a few other poems (for instance "A Gender Theory" and "Thin White Shirts" and "First Wife" and "You Lament") try to push beyond irony into earnestness and wholehearted declaration. The tension between irony and belief is the engine of Halliday's poetry.
£19.71
The University of Chicago Press Thresherphobe
Classic Blunder - After a noticeably happy day I sleep - and wake at dawn to a sudden sense of having erred. What have I done? I've made the classic blunder the blunder of living onward forwardly toward some disappointing future - what a fool - I should have lived not forwardly but sideways or circularly to stay in days like (what now has to be called) yesterday. Instead I've allowed the sun already to start pouring through the curtains the diminishments and inferiorities of a crude and unsentimental next day. To keep that train from leaving the station must call for some incredible level of concentration. In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries - both dire and hilarious - from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetnal frustration of our cravings for ego triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday's voice-driven poetry wants to find insight - or at least a stay against confusion - through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can: let posterity (if any) say we rambled truly.
£19.71
The University of Chicago Press Jab
Human, hunger, happiness, hope, heart and Halliday all start with "h", as does ham. Accident? Maybe! But seldom have the flour of the humanistic and the egg yolk of honesty mixed more swellingly with the yeast of desire and the salt of self-doubt -not to mention the olive paste of ambition. Halliday has whacked Death and Mustabilite before, but this time ...this time he whacks them again. After this "Jab", the world will never be the same. Or at least, a few hundred conversations, here and there, will be somewhat affected. Roll over Death, and tell Mutabilitie the news.
£20.61
