Classic Blunder - After a noticeably happy day I sleep - and wake at dawn to a sudden sense of having erred. What have I done? I've made the classic blunder the blunder of living onward forwardly toward some disappointing future - what a fool - I should have lived not forwardly but sideways or circularly to stay in days like (what now has to be called) yesterday. Instead I've allowed the sun already to start pouring through the curtains the diminishments and inferiorities of a crude and unsentimental next day. To keep that train from leaving the station must call for some incredible level of concentration. In his sixth collection, Mark Halliday continues to seek ways of using the smart playfulness of such poets as Frank O'Hara and Kenneth Koch to explore life's emotional mysteries - both dire and hilarious - from the perpetual dissolving of our past to the perpetnal frustration of our cravings for ego triumph, for sublime connection with an erotically idealized Other, and for peace of spirit. Animated by belief in the possible truths to be reached in interpersonal speech, Halliday's voice-driven poetry wants to find insight - or at least a stay against confusion - through personality without being trapped in personality. History will leave much of what we are on the threshing floor, Halliday notes, but in the meantime we do what we can: let posterity (if any) say we rambled truly.

"A totally original, quintessentially American poet. Mark Halliday's work is forever in the pleasure section of my reading life. Sad very funny, thoughtful, honest lyrically and for mally adventurous, Halliday's voice is whimsical-seeming and crazy-quilt on the surface; in fact, his poems tremble and reel in the fierce abrasive currents of being alive" (Tony Hoagland)"

Mark Halliday is disunguished professor of English at Ohio University His previous books include Selfwolf and Jab, both published by the University of Chicago Press. He is also the author of a critical study of Wallace Stevens and many essays on contemporary poets.