Overview

Happy Neighborhood explores through poetry and prose the cultivation of contented place. How must men in particular sift through the rewards, and belabored grudges, of their own childhoods in order to move productively forward? These thoughtful, carefully crafted meditations seek to define happiness at home. The poems begin with daily walks, often with a dog, to the waterfront park near the author's house in St. Petersburg, Florida. The essays, in dialog with the verse, explore the personal, literary, cultural, and historical questions that prompted the poems. Hallock's influences and reading are wide ranging, though he draws especially from seventeenth-century devotional traditions, in which the reflective writing serves to bring the soul to a proper space of rest. There is poetry about infidelity and marriage, fatherhood, insomnia, a front porch hammock, political corruption, holy communion, and homemade biscuits. Although seemingly content in title, Happy Neighborhood candidly confronts the challenges the author has faced as a father, spouse, and son. Hallock grapples with finding peace in Florida, his adopted home state and not where he ever chose to live. In becoming a father, he must unpack painful emotions that he still carries, and not pass onto his own child. And as a writer, he wrestles with artistic self-indulgence and the need for poetry that can accomplish honest emotional work.

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9780881469097

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Thomas Hallock is professor of English at the University of South Florida's St. Petersburg campus. His publications include A Road Course in American Literature; From the Fallen Tree; and William Bartram, the Search for Nature's Design.

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