Annal:1999 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 1999. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Repair: Poems
- 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 1999 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 1999 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 26.5
Repair is body work in C. K. Williams’s sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life’s easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: “the poetry of the sentence.”
The Father of the Predicaments
- 1999 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.49
Heather McHugh takes her cue from Aristotle, who wrote that “the father of the predicaments is being.” For McHugh, being is intimately, though not ultimately, bound to language, and these poems cut to the quick, delivering their revelations with awesome precision.
The Oval Hour: Poems
- 1999 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.49
In The Oval Hour, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize, Kathleen Peirce addresses the vulnerability of language—which is to say the vulnerability of our reality—when we are in extreme states of desire and loss, especially erotic desire and erotic loss. Central to the book is its series of Confessions, twenty formally similar poems that contend with the Confessions of Saint Augustine. “Passing through innocence, I came either to experience / or guilt, or they came to me, displacing innocence”: these luminous poems explore the generation and overlapping of…
- 1999 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.49
In The Dreamhouse, Tom Sleigh’s poetry is a medium for both revelation and linguistic invention. The meditative clarity of Sleigh’s poems, his ability to range between the plain and high style with complete naturalness of intonation, and the varying and always surprising musical effects he accomplishes in each poem display his unequaled flair for innovation that is never willful or forced but which always works to forward the poems’ emotional and intellectual resonances. The Dreamhouse marks Sleigh as one of the most inventive and provocative poets of his generation.
- 1999 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.49
The publication of Study for the World’s Body: New & Selected Poems, a finalist for the National Book Award in 1994, reinforced David St. John’s reputation as a poet of wild imagination and formidable accomplishment. Now, with the arrival of The Red Leaves of Night, St. John further demonstrates his extraordinary gifts as a poet of true vision and virtuosity in this seamless meditation on the ecstatic anguish of possession and loss.
Possession and loss, rapture and despair: David St. John’s narrator remains unflinchingly aware that the trajectory…
