From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1995. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation
Robert Pinsky
This widely praised version of Dante’s masterpiece, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Harold Morton Landon Translation Award of the Academy of American Poets, is more idiomatic and approachable than its many predecessors. Former U.S. Poet Laureate Pinsky employs slant rhyme and near rhyme to preserve Dante’s terza rima form without distorting the flow of English idiom. The result is a clear and vigorous translation that is also unique, student-friendly, and faithful to the original: “A brilliant success,” as Bernard Knox wrote in
The New York Review of Books.
Split Horizon: Poems
Thomas Lux
Thomas Lux is the author of such books as
Sunday, Half Promised Land, and
The Drowned River. His poetry has been steadily growing and penetrating deeper into the plain-spoken, saturnine, witty language that he virtually invented. In his latest work, Lux’s level gaze, cool talk, weird rhythms, and quirky humor place him in a special territory—entirely original—of contemporary American poetry. These new poems, like the book itself, have unusual titles (“Loudmouth Soup,” “Virgule,” “Each Startled Touch Returns the Touch Unstartled”) and circle around their subjects in strange ways, most often dealing with the lonely oddity of the individual in a society that inflexibly ignores individuality.
Song: Poems
Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Brigit Pegeen Kelly writes a lyrical, surreal poetry that flies toward the magical. Informed by a spiritual vision, her poems sweep us into new relationships, as the darkness that “doesn’t come down, but rises up…. It gets the ankles first. It circles/ The ankles like flood water gradually filling/The basement of a house. Dark water full/ Of unnameable things.”
City of Salt
Gregory Orr
A reader unfamiliar with Orr’s work may be surprised, at first, by the richness of both action and visual detail that his succinct, spare poems convey. Lyricism can erupt in the midst of desolation.” —
Boston Sunday Globe
New and Selected Poems
Gary Soto
For over two decades, the award-winning poet and author Gary Soto has been offering his readers a vision that transcends the ordinary, making him one of today's most celebrated Chicano writers.
New and Selected Poems includes the best of his seven full-length collections, plus over 23 new poems previously unpublished in book form. From the charged, short-lined poems of Soto's early writing to an unflinching look at poverty and hard labor in California's Central Valley to the off-beat humor in his longer, more recent work,
New and Selected Poems is a timely tribute to a brilliant writer whose work confirms the power of the human spirit to survive and soar.
