Keep This Forever

by Mark Halliday

Book Overview

Poetry. In this, his fifth book of poems, written in the aftermath of his father's death, Mark Halliday proves to be one of America's most intimate poets. Like Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch, Halliday's poems chat with the reader in earnest yet humorous ways and in wholly believable voices. Whether exploring grief or desire or loneliness, these poems never forget the human longing for permanence. "He is prolix and quotidian, a Whitman in a supermarket,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1932195726
• ISBN13: 9781932195729
• Release Date: October 2008
• Publisher: Tupelo Press
• Length: 80 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.2" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

the funniest poet in america

Mark Halliday is one of the funniest poets in American poetry; edgier and nervier than Billy Collins, more grounded than James Tate- but comparisons are odious. Keep this forever has lots of wit and lots of heart, and lots of perceptive investigations-- that's what his poems are--of what it feels like to be an American in our time, in our landscapes of consumerism and complicity, and isolation and relationship. Halliday can play postmodern word games when he wants to, but his poems satirize such word games; his poems don't provide solutions, except the solution of honesty, and honoring your own confused experience of humanity. He's not sentimental like too many sincerists, but he's not cynical either. And he's always clear as aquavit; but more flavorful, more insightful. I laugh out loud all the time at his poems.