Tasker Street

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

Halliday's second poetry collection... is filled with poems that penetrate to our hearts. The poems themselves are full of details and are very conversational in tone, much like the poems of Miller Williams... Throughout, Halliday uses proper nouns to help give a sense of place and identity. Often autobiographical in nature, but still moving beyond the personal, the poems work well as a whole. One can easily appreciate their moments of truth. Highly recommended.--Library Journal Mark Halliday's poems are so readable--so funny, so brilliantly gauged in their sense of timing and their colloquial swing, so various in perception--that it is a shock to realize that nearly all of them are about loss or ambition, usually both.--Robert Pinsky, Yale Review Tasker Street is a disarming, fresh, comic assault. These poems restlessly dismantle easy assumptions about our lives. The anti-hero at the heart of this collection would awaken fearful-- and, finally, affectionate-- emotions at a family reunion. These rich, expansive poems have a neurasthenic energy and a mad verve that I greatly enjoy.--James Tate Amusingly and at times disturbingly, these poems explore the shifting boundary between imagination and what we lazily agree to call 'real life.' The details of their Americana display a cunning balance of irony and affection. Halliday's wit and colloquial energy, and the evocative of his nostalgia, make this a rewarding book.--Robert B. Shaw

Mark Halliday is the author of Little Star (a National Poetry Series Selection), Selfwolf, and Stevens and the Interpersonal. Halliday has taught at Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania, Wilmington Friends School, Indiana University, Western Michigan University, and Ohio University, where he has been since 1996.