Customer Reviews

Selfwolf (Phoenix Poets)

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The best thing about Mr. Halliday's work is that you can see the personal nature of the author in the poems. I can see Mark sitting up late at night writing all of this (Loaded Inflections) and I can understand the relationships he has with his characters (Divorce Dream). Selfwolf is absolutely believable and devoid of cloying sentiment. His personality is on those pages and to read them leaves me wanting to research volumes on his thoughts. This book is a lot less like typical poetry and a lot more like the most interesting discussion you've ever had with that one person who is intriguing because he won't let you pick his brain. The one disappointment? I want to know even more.

This highly accessible collection of poems includes thirty-seven pieces and is divided into three sections. The first section offers domestic poems, free-association poems, rants and occasional poems. Halliday uses mostly literal language in the first person narrative. Tonette, a poem about a childhood experience, has a credible voice with bittersweet irony and kid-like honesty: "I went to my seat grinning with ears like scarlet beacons,/ my grin tried to say `Boys don't need music'/ but said instead `I am lost on this planet.'" Also notable is Narragansett Boulevard with its unique, organic poetic form that interweaves repeat words used in its previous lines. Divorce Dream, however, was a disappointment because I felt like the poet was excusing himself after writing a lovely surrealist/symbolic poem by confessing that it was "only a dream."

Halliday uses very specific forms to push a theme: a poem on internal questioning stemming from external influences swims harmoniously in a loose-association, tangential form. He doesn't just have gripes, he has solutions, too: "empty the closet:/ there is a pale blue suit that knows too much about/ vows not kept/ and thirty shirts hang there nursing thirty claims." Another example of form-following-function can be seen in Soul on Bench. Here, the rhyming scheme is essential because the speaker is deliberately breathing in order to listen to his internal metronome.

Section two touches on the art of writing. The poet presupposes his critics and writes: "Oh, Halliday thinks his most banal experiences are poetry already!'" Poem du jour? Why not? Writers can't wait for inspiration to knock them off their feet; they merely glean all they can from daily life. Poetry Friendship on Earth is a candid look at the need for approval between two poet friends. Regarding diction, Halliday weighs the implications of certain words for what they evoke. This poet takes a clear look at instances, and he transforms them on paper, from which the reader may extrapolate and learn. Halliday uses contradiction, irony and sarcasm when he's inviting the reader to question with him; play-full, imaginative threads when he wants us to feel his freedom; and he jars us with harsh-world reality when he wishes to elicit empathy.

The third section revolves around interpersonal relationships. Halliday can be so inventive and pithy, as seen in the object-inspired poem Bad People (where the speaker supposes the circumstances under which broken glass came to be littering a baseball diamond). By far my favorite poem is the piece on synchronicity, Cleveland. Have you ever had this uncanny, unshakeable feeling that someone was thinking of you? Suppose it's someone you don't know, someone who has never met you!? Halliday speaks to the collective psyche through primordial, tame images but also speaks to the sexual being in all of us - this example is from Skirt, "to follow the play of shadow in those folds of cloth." Halliday offers sociological insight and is universal in his poetry-composing. In this beautiful collection, vivid imagination has no bounds. These last words from Skirt, "There across the crowded room she turns and turns,/ her hair swings, her skirt swirls, she doesn't know/ I'm standing here with these deep insights into everything/ but if I write it all down with a lovely/ swirling of its own she might read it and see/ that if I stare at her it is not just the usual but/ because I am interesting here alone at the edge of the dance."

many good poems, but there's so much irony in this book that when you get to poems like Tonette the poet sounds like a hypocrite. how'd erma bombeck get into the room? "bad people" is a weird mix of nostalgia, empathy and disapproval but ends up feeling parental (ask your mother) and hence cliche. "Other Pages" reads like a page torn from the Frank Bidart handbook "Emotional displays through Typography." and haven't i seen some of these poems before, in Tasker Street? the poet seems to have painted himself into a corner here.