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.

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 Mutabilitie 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.

With Wallace Stevens emerging as a father figure for American poetry of the late twentieth century, Mark Halliday argues that it is time for this "poet of ideas" to undergo an ethical critique. In this bold, accessible reconsideration of Stevens' work, he insists on the importance of interpersonal relations in any account of human life in the modern world. Although Stevens outwardly denies aspects of life that center on such relations as those between friends, lovers, family members, and political constituents, Halliday uncovers in his poetry an anxious awareness of the importance of these relations. Here we see the difficulties Stevens made for himself in wanting to offer a thoroughly satisfying version of secular spiritual health in the modern world without facing up to the moral and psychological implications of his own interpersonal needs, problems, and responsibilities. The final chapter reveals, however, an unusually encouraging "avuncular" attitude toward the reader of the poetry, which may be felt to redeem Stevens from the alienation observed earlier. Halliday develops his views by way of comparisons between Stevens and other poets, especially Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and John Ashbery. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

With Wallace Stevens emerging as a father figure for American poetry of the late twentieth century, Mark Halliday argues that it is time for this "poet of ideas" to undergo an ethical critique. In this bold, accessible reconsideration of Stevens' work, he insists on the importance of interpersonal relations in any account of human life in the modern world. Although Stevens outwardly denies aspects of life that center on such relations as those between friends, lovers, family members, and political constituents, Halliday uncovers in his poetry an anxious awareness of the importance of these relations. Here we see the difficulties Stevens made for himself in wanting to offer a thoroughly satisfying version of secular spiritual health in the modern world without facing up to the moral and psychological implications of his own interpersonal needs, problems, and responsibilities. The final chapter reveals, however, an unusually encouraging "avuncular" attitude toward the reader of the poetry, which may be felt to redeem Stevens from the alienation observed earlier. Halliday develops his views by way of comparisons between Stevens and other poets, especially Thomas Hardy, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, and John Ashbery.

Originally published in 1991.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Three writers offer words in search of wonders. The author Cole Moreton, the poet Mark Halliday and the journalist Martin Wroe collaborate on a collection of poems that are full of honesty, doubt and beauty.

Winner of the 1991 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press.

During a week in January 1981, poets Allen Grossman and Mark Halliday met for a series of conversations exploring "the meanings for us as poets arising from the difference between us-- differences of generation and education as well as of temperament and poetic style." The result was "Against Our Vanishing", which Charles Altieri called " the best in contemporary poetic thinking."

"The Sighted Singer: Two Works on Poetry for Readers and Writers" makes available a revised and significantly expanded version of "Against Our Vanishing" and includes Grossman's recent treatise "Summa Lyrica: A Primer of the Commonplaces in the Speculative Poetics". This combined edition provides a sophisticated yet accessible discussion-- across generations-- of "the fundamental discourse of poetic structure". For students and teachers, for writers and readers, "The Sighted Singer" is a splendid introduction to both the tradition of poetry and its contemporary practice.

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.