Please note: In order to keep Hive up to date and provide users with the best features, we are no longer able to fully support Internet Explorer. The site is still available to you, however some sections of the site may appear broken. We would encourage you to move to a more modern browser like Firefox, Edge or Chrome in order to experience the site fully.

Losers Dream on, Paperback / softback Book

Losers Dream on Paperback / softback

Part of the Phoenix Poets series

Paperback / softback

Description

We are all losing all the time. Four titanic forces--time, mortality, forgetting, and confusion--win victories over us each day.

We all "know" this yet we keep dreaming of beautiful fulfillments, shapely culminations, devotions nobly sustained--in family life, in romance, in work, in citizenship.

What obsesses Halliday in Losers Dream On is how to recognize reality without relinquishing the pleasure and creativity and courage of our dreaming.

Halliday's poetry exploits the vast array of dictions, idioms, rhetorical maneuvers, and tones available to real-life speakers (including speakers talking to themselves).

Often Halliday gives a poem to a speaker who is distressed, angry, confused, defensive, self-excusing, or driven by yearning, so that the poem may dramatize the speaker's state of mind while also implying the poet's ironic perspective on the speaker.

Meanwhile, a few other poems (for instance "A Gender Theory" and "Thin White Shirts" and "First Wife" and "You Lament") try to push beyond irony into earnestness and wholehearted declaration.

The tension between irony and belief is the engine of Halliday's poetry.

Information

Information

Also in the Phoenix Poets series  |  View all