From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 1996. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994
Jorie Graham
For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing, Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry:
Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts,
Erosion,
The End of Beauty,
Region of Unlikeness, and
Materialism.
New and Selected Poems
Donald Justice
The present volume brings to mind again one of the most interesting aspects of Justice’s poetry: his dedication to formal craftsmanship and his use of it in dealing with contemporary matters; so that a recondite poetic form (the pantoum) is made to hold a commentary on the 1930s in the poem called “Pantoum of the Great Depression.”
Chickamauga: Poems
Charles Wright
This volume, Wright’s eleventh book of poetry, is a vivid, contemplative, far-reaching, yet wholly plain-spoken collection of moments appearing as lenses through which to see the world beyond our moments.
Chickamauga is also a virtuoso exploration of the power of concision in lyric poetry—a testament to the flexible music of the long line Wright has made his own. As a reviewer in
Library Journal noted: “Wright is one of those rare and gifted poets who can turn thought into music. Following his self-prescribed regimen of purgatio, illuminato, and contemplatio, Wright spins one lovely lyric after another on such elemental subjects as sky, trees, birds, months, and seasons. But the real subject is the thinking process itself and the mysterious alchemy of language: ‘The world is a language we never quite understand.’ ”
