David Halliday: 48 books

Across the hydro field butterflies, rags of yellow, white, orange, were tossed by the breeze from milkwood to milkwood. Dogs ran free, tearing through the long grass after unseen prey sometimes leaping into the air out of sheer joy. Birds, garter snakes, toads, and clouds of grasshoppers made their...

Murder is a book that unwinds like a movie with each poem a scene. We open with an introduction to the killer followed by the killer’s introduction to the victim at the murder scene. We read a report on the victim and then are introduced to the murder scene, the body at the morgue, the meeting of...

There was a white van. Inside were four bank robbers. Next door to the bank was a restaurant. A pregnant woman worked in the restaurant. She was the wife of a detective. Outside the window she could see the snow continuing to fall. There were two thugs. Who had been engaged to collect a debt. From...

I don’t know if I said something wrong. But Paul changed. He wasn’t the Paul in the club. He started to act rough. He reached for the empty bottle of wine and smacked me on the head. I laid there for a while. Out of it. As I began to come to, I could feel his hands on my neck. And I passed out...

A bunch of poets got together in 1971 and agreed upon nothing. I declared at the time that I had planted my flag in Church Street and from that moment on my poems would take root there. Ted Plantos took Queen Street. Robert Priest took all the pubs on Spadina and points north and east. And other poets...

“Charlie. I can hardly believe it’s you. How long has it been?” “I can’t remember that far back. Not since the shock treatments. As you can see, I got over my phobias about telephones. If I’m going to get cancer from Ma Bell then bring it on! Remember that phone routine that Bob Newhart...

A man is dying in his backyard of a heart attack. He begins to recall his life. Except that it is not his life. It is the life of a fictional character from a popular television situation comedy. And he can't...

I wait. It feels like my life no longer belongs to me. I wait for Aristotle to go to sleep. I cook dinner. I wait for Frank to come home. We eat. Frank talks about what some kid said in his class today. I listen. For Aristotle to wake up. I smile at Frank and pretend that I am relaxed. That I am interested....

Sometimes I can’t remember what he looked like. Before my mom died. He seemed stronger back then. Taller. It’s like when my mom died something inside my father caved in. Waking up, I can hear my old man downstairs. He’s been up for hours. Don’t think that he ever sleeps. Wanders around the...

2017 was a year in the wrong century. The seventeenth century. My head was on a pike outside Newgate Castle. Or someone who looked like me. Laughing at the Prince. People are starting to fear what they say. Next year they will be afraid of what they think. This is a book of survival. Through a world...

Sometimes I can’t remember what mom looks like. Sometimes all I can remember is her smile. Mom has only been dead a year and her face is already beginning to fade. I have to look at the pictures dad keeps on the mantle. They too are beginning to fade. There must be something wrong with me that I...

It is the landscape of Eliot and Pound. Uppers and blue pills. Snow drifts and psychiatric hospitals. Streetcars and shock treatments. A delusional young woman boards an airplane hoping to escape the horrors of this world. Some time during the flight she steps off the airplane into another world....

"The stain on the cement stared back at me. I wanted to go home and get a pail of hot water and wash it off. Several ants were grazing on it. I looked around. Everything was the same as it had been a few days earlier. The telephone booth. The newspaper boxes. The Six Points Plaza across the street....

The sixties rose out of the fifties with so much hope. Eisenhouer was gone. Kennedy was now. Wrestling was real. The Leafs were winning Stanley Cups. Television was a series of comedies about white kids in the suburbs with skin problems. Or westerns about bounty hunters, and Boot Hill, smart alec...