Jab

by Mark Halliday

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.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2002

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

[Chris - Quarter Press Editor · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd only read a few poems by Halliday before this collection, but I loved them. I was really looking forward to this collection.

At first, I was in love. His humor and humanity are so fully captured in his poems that it boggles the mind how someone can distill so much into a handful of words. His "story" poems are nothing short of fantastic.

Even his more playful work, with his nonsense words and interesting wordplay, are fun to read.

However, as the collection progressed, and I made it into the last 1/4 of it, the poems started falling short, becoming too abstract or inaccessible to someone like me. And they probably are wonderful poems; they simply weren't for me and, in the end, felt like a bit of a letdown, considering how much I enjoyed most of the rest of the collection.

Still, I will be tracking more of his work down in the future.

[Gerbik · Rating 3 out of 5]

A phrase that occurred to me in trying to articulate what made me uneasy about many of the poems in this book was "stylized self-effacement." I feel that there is something dishonest about the way Halliday courts personae and the interpersonal (he is never very solitary in these poems; he's always surrounded by people) only so as to reveal the Narcissistic Everyman who happens to be preoccupied with the politics of the poetry world. In the weakest pieces (albeit perhaps the most characteristic), I find a really abrasive bitterness that refuses to engage interpersonal relations as anything more than a facade of narcissistic endeavors in which people come together only long enough to deflect any possibility for an authentic relation. As satire, this may be what he set out to demonstrate; but as poems that engage the art in a compelling way, I find him sometimes wanting. The first fifth of the book was spectacular, and when he's FUNNY about egotism, he's VERY funny - but sometimes this smacks of having been around people he does not respect for a bit too long.

[Mike · Rating 4 out of 5]

Halliday is a terrific poet. I love how the blurbs on the back range from less-than-flattering to curiously hostile. And they're probably right to some degree. Halliday is endlessly introspective and sometimes you get sore in the ribs from all the coy suggestive nudging. Also, these people are poets, who trade professionally in being social trainwrecks.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am so glad that this book was recommended to me. The peoms are stellar and that is not a word one throws anround too frequently.