Annal:2002 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2002 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.52
Alice Notley has earned a reputation as one of the most challenging and engaging radical female poets at work today. Her last collection, Mysteries of Small Houses, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Structured as a long series of interconnected poems in which one of the main elements is an ongoing dialogue with a seedy detective, Disobedience sets out to explore the visible as well as the unconscious. These poems, composed during a fifteen-month period, also deal with being a woman in France, with turning fifty, and with being a poet, and thus seemingly despised or at least ignored.
Maraca: New & Selected Poems, 1966-2000
- 2002 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.52
Born in Puerto Rico in 1949, Cruz moved to New York at age six, but always remembered hearing novels and poems declaimed as the men in his family rolled cigars, and the children put little bands around them. Those memories continue to inform a body of work that has dazzled readers since he exploded onto the international scene with Snaps, from Random House in 1969.
War Music: Volume 1-4 of Logue's Homer
- 2002 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.52
In his rendering of eight books of Homer’s Iliad, Logue here retells some of the most evocative episodes of the war classic, including the death of Patroclus and Achilles’s fateful return to battle, that sealed the doom of Troy. Retaining the great poem’s story line but rewriting every incident, Logue brings the Trojan War to life for modern audiences.
Conscious and Verbal: Poems
- 2002 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.52
A wonderful new collection by a wizard of contemporary poetry
Everything widens with distance, in this perspective.
The dog’s paws, trotting, rotate his end of infinity
and dam water feels a shiver few willow drapes share.
Bright leaks through their wigwam re-purple the skinny beans
then rapidly the light tops treetops and is shortened
into a day. Everywhere stands pat beside its shadow
for the great bald radiance never seen in dreams. —from “Aurora Prone”
In July 1996, the Australian press reported that after three weeks in a coma, the country’s greatest poet, Les Murray, was again “conscious and verbal.” Shortly thereafter, Murray resumed his work in words, and over the next four years he wrote these sixty-five poems, which, in their different ways, literally or sensually, replay that dreamy announcement of the perpetually waking world. Conscious and Verbal is one of the legendary poet’s richest, fullest, and most imaginative books to date.
