Annal:1993 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1993. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 1992 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 1992 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.43
The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Cluck’s first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized myth of contemporary family. Now in The Wild Iris, her most important and accomplished collection to date, ecstatic imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition,…
- 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.43
Readers of John Ashbery’s recent book Flow Chart will find the continuation of its spirit, at once tragic and playful, dense and volatile, passionate and impersonal, in this extraordinary new collection of lyric poems. The title Hotel Lautreamont alludes to the pseudonymous Count de Lautreamont, a nineteenth-century poet remembered for his presurrealist epic prose poem, “The Songs of Maldoror”. Little is known about him, save that his real name was Isidore Ducasse and that he spent his brief adult life in various hotels in Paris, checking out of his…
Selected Poems: 1946-1985
- 1993 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.43
This new Selected Poems replaces an earlier selection of work by James Merrill entitled From the First Nine (1982), now out of print; it includes 121 poems taken from that work and from Late Settings (1985), but it excludes the long narrative poem “The Changing Light at Sandover”, which is republished simultaneously in a separate volume. Together the two give solid definition to a body of poetic work that must be accounted among the finest in English of our time.
Of James Merrill, the critic Harold Bloom has said, “He is indisputably a…
