Living Name is a collection of essays on American poetry written by an expert practitioner of that art. Poet and critic Mark Halliday turns his attention to the work of poets who interest him because they create convincing voices of people dealing with the everyday. Instead of trying to survey the vast variety of modern poetry, Halliday considers an idiosyncratic selection of poets he finds compelling for their originality of style and exploration of human possibilities, including Walt Whitman, Kenneth Fearing, Kenneth Koch, Robert Pinsky, Rachel Wetzsteon, Tony Hoagland, Claire Bateman, and Dean Young.

Each essay includes thorough close readings of individual poems, reflecting a commitment to the idea that a poem as a work of art needs to be appreciated as a unified whole. Halliday's writing is judicious and meditative but not overly scholarly or academic. A long piece at the beginning of the book, "Poetry and the Rescue of Particulars," argues that poems often attempt to reclaim the details of our usual routines from the chaotic confusion and noise of daily existence. The impulse to write a poem, Halliday believes, often stems from the notion that representing in poetry a sliver of human life keeps it in the world, as a trace of the vanishing moment is retained and endowed with some form of lasting reality.

Throughout Living Name, Halliday enacts the allegiances that have driven his criticism for many years: to listen for genuine voices in poetry; to study whole poems, not merely passages; and to look for intelligent efforts to illuminate truths of human experience.