Annal:2000 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000. 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.”
- 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.5
A bawdy, witty revelation by an award-winning poet who celebrates the soul of the South in jest and in elegy. Exulting in the drawl of his native Alabama, Rodney Jones’s poems play out the life cycle of the young southern white male, from high school football games to first debauchery, from ignorance to self-understanding. Other poems speak of laying sewer pipe, of crows and sex, ink and raccoons, penises and perpetual motion machines. In many of these poems the southern drawl lives forever, riding on the tide of regional language, poking fun yet delighting in…
Midnight Salvage: Poems 1995-1998
- 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.5
“Look: with all my fear I’m here with you, trying what it means, to stand fast; what it means to move.” In these astonishing new poems, Adrienne Rich dares to look and to extend her poetic language as witness to the treasures-the midnight salvage-we rescue from fear and violence. Adrienne Rich’s work has long challenged social plausibilities built on violence and demoralizing power. In Midnight Salvage she continues her explorations at the end of the century, trying, as she has said, “to face the terrible with hope, in language as complex as necessary, as…
