Annal:1997 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1997. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry winner
- Score: 30.48
Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who “sounds like nobody else.”
Resurrection Update: Collected Poems 1975-1997
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
This compilation spans twenty years and includes all the work from three out-of-print early books, as well as recent and new poems by the author of The Meadow, Lethal Frequencies, and Elements. By turns surrealistic, terse, elegiac, and funny, Galvin is a unique and powerful voice in the American West.
An Octave Above Thunder: New and Selected Poems
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
An Octave Above Thunder presents a collection of poems spanning more than twenty years in the career of Carol Muske, who has won acclaim for work which marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and technical craft. What most distinguishes Carol Muske’s poetry is her awareness of the complicated web into which the personal and the political, the familial and the feminist, are woven. Filled with audible contemplation—invocation, echo, dreamsong, dirge—Muske’s lyrical precision, assured touch, and exacting clarity make her one of the most talented poets of her generation.
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
Peter Sacks draws upon his life as an expatriate as well as upon his early years in South Africa, including his time spent in the military, to create a remarkably powerful book of poetry. At turns meditative and narrative, Sacks is unafraid to lay bare in vivid imagery his sense of both personal and historical losses, and his commitment to the works of mourning and of cultural repair. Even the love poems emerge from this book with the impress of both bittersweet aspiration and regret.
The Four Questions of Melancholy: New and Selected Poems
Tomaz Salamun, Christopher Merrill
- 1997 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.47
This highly eclectic body of work spans all phases of Salamun’s career, which began in the late ‘60s. Approximately sixty percent of the poems appear here for the first time in English.
