Jab (Phoenix Poets) - Softcover

Halliday, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0226313867 ISBN 13: 9780226313863

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Mark Halliday is distinguished professor of English at Ohio University.

From the Inside Flap

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.

Reviews

With his fourth book of verse, the aptly titled Jab, the Ohio-based poet-critic Mark Halliday (Selfwolf) veers skillfully between autobiographical reminiscence and bleakly comic free-associations, offering late-baby-boomer slices of life along with up-to-date self-consciousness (somewhere between James Tate and Albert Goldbarth). One moment he promises "a poem so rich it made normal living look like sawdust"; the next he's "telling stories about our absent-minded teachers/ who forgot damn near everything except what they really loved."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Writing as a baby boomer chagrined to find his dreams intact after decades of mild disappointment, Halliday is not fashionable. He is prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket, a confessional poet who does not take himself very seriously. In one poem, he answers a colleague's challenge: "Poems should be aggressively fictive / since fictivity is mandated anyway. I guess I dig." His cool patter skewers pomposity—and itself, being so self-consciously out of date. Halliday speaks in dissonant cultural registers, defying irony: "To dissolve into a category, / is that why I marched this far … / lugging these bags and parcels bedecked with surprising stickers?"
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0226313867
• ISBN 13: 9780226313863
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104