Mark Halliday is a poet, critic, and professor of English at Ohio University. Author of five collections of poetry, he is a well-known, widely-anthologized name in the USA. In 2006, he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a winner of the 2001 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
He first crossed continents with two poems in Poetry Review (1999). Peter Forbes, editor at that time, celebrated him as a distinctive new voice; more Halliday poems appeared in subsequent issues. Then he arrived in person: in 2003 he was warmly received at the Aldeburgh Festival, performed the following year at the Snape Poetry Prom and, in 2007, read at Balliol College, Oxford.
Halliday isn't easy to categorize. Though described by poet David Graham as one of the 'ablest practitioners' of the 'ultra-talk poem' (a term coined by Halliday himself), ultra-talk is only one of the things he does. Intensely conscious of the presumption of the poet, he wriggles under his own critical micriscope, wryly examining our 21st centry poetic stance. He is witty, wayward, sardonic and serious.
This is his first UK poetry collection.
