Description: Winner of the 1991 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. Written in the tones and rhythms of everyday speech, Mark Halliday's poems focus on gaps between people and the questions that arise when we try to bridge those gaps through language. Some poems explore the fissures created by race, gender, and class. More often, though, the kinds of separation and alienation evoked in Tasker Street emerge from the sheer fact of difference between one consciousness and another. The poems wonder how the pain and frustration of this isolation may at times be relieved or counterbalanced through empathy, love, and art. The possibility that lost selves may be rescued through language haunts the first of the book's four sections. The poems in the second section emphasize the need for a feeling that one's life is significant, not perpetually dissolving. In the third section, Halliday struggles to imagine the inner lives of people against the obliterative force of the multiplicity of selves. Six final poems crystallize yearnings for some sense of consolation and renewed confidence.
Review Quotes:
"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