Tasker Street

Winner of the 1991 Juniper Prize, the annual poetry award sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Press. Written in the tones and rhythms of everyday speech, Mark Halliday's poems focus on gaps between people and the questions that arise when we try to bridge those gaps through language. Some poems explore the fissures created by race, gender, and class. More often, though, the kinds of separation and alienation evoked in Tasker Street emerge from the sheer fact of difference between one consciousness and another. The poems wonder how the pain and frustration of this isolation may at times be relieved or counterbalanced through empathy, love, and art. The possibility that lost selves may be rescued through language haunts the first of the book's four sections. The poems in the second section emphasize the need for a feeling that one's life is significant, not perpetually dissolving. In the third section, Halliday struggles to imagine the inner lives of people against the obliterative force of the multiplicity of selves. Six final poems crystallize yearnings for some sense of consolation and renewed confidence.