Little Star

National Poetry Series

by Mark Halliday

Mark Halliday's first book of poems explores the possibilities for poetry of a conversational discursive voice: How much of the mystery of contemporary experience can be expressed by a poem that maintains the diction and rhythms of natural speech? This problem, the history of which reaches back to Wordsworth and beyond, is boldly engaged in Little Star. The poems take up troubling emotions and issues--the temptations of nostalgia, the relation between lust and love, the individual's fear of obscurity and insignificance, the yearnig to rescue experience from change by means of art, the sense that "your happiness contains the seeds of your sorrow"--and show the speaker struggling, as if thinking aloud in an excited monologue or tense debate or painful reminiscence, to find some new clarity, some new way of grasping the problem,. The influence of the poetry of Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch will be apparent in the insouciance, self-deprecating humor, and autobiographical candor of Little Star. Yet Halliday's style is his own. It will disturb poetic formalists and charm the open-minded. (from dust jacket)

Genres: Poetry

61 pages, Hardcover

First published August 1, 1987

About the author

Mark Halliday (born 1949 in Ann Arbor, Michigan) is a noted American poet, professor and critic. He is author of six collections of poetry, most recently "Thresherphobe" (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and Keep This Forever (Tupelo Press, 2008). His honors include serving as the 1994 poet in residence at The Frost Place, inclusion in several annual editions of The Best American Poetry series and of the Pushcart Prize anthology, receiving a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, and winning the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Halliday earned his B.A. (1971) and M.A. (1976) from Brown University, and his Ph.D. in English literature from Brandeis University in 1983, where he studied with poets Allen Grossman and Frank Bidart. He has taught English literature and writing at Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, Western Michigan University, Indiana University. Since 1996, he has taught at Ohio University, where, in 2012, he was awarded the rank of distinguished professor.[5] He is married to J. Allyn Rosser.

Reviews

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rockin' collection. Literally!

[Rauan · Rating 2 out of 5]

this sort of poetry has quite a following. but, mainly it's just boring.