Annal:2004 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep: Poems
- 2004 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.54
Those aren’t stars, darling
That’s your nervous system
Nanna didn’t take you to planetariums like this
—from “Hyper-Berceuse: 3 A.M.”
August Kleinzahler’s new poems stretch and go places he has never gone before: they have his signature high color and rhythmic jump, but they take on a breadth of voice and achieve registers that his earlier work only hinted at. Ranging from Vegas and Mayfair to the Asian steppes and contemporary Berlin, these poems touch down at will in tableaux where Liberace unceremoniously meets with St. Kevin and Attila with Zsa Zsa Gabor. Surprise after surprise, nothing seems to lie outside Kleinzahler’s purview.
This is the strongest collection to date from a poet with “the vision and confident skill to make American poetry new” (Clive Wilmer, The Times [London]).
Notes from the Divided Country: Poems
- 2002 Walt Whitman winner
- 2004 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 16.52
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts some of the most difficult, most unanswerable questions—colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, love. She considers what a homeland would be, for a divided nation and divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen or exile.
In settings from New York to San Francisco, Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold/our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land between every “you” and “I,” her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past, and hope for the future.
With its wide range of voices, styles and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.
The Ha-Ha: Poems
- 2004 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.54
A feature of English landscape architecture, a ha-ha is a wall at the bottom of a ditch; its purpose is to allow the presence of cows and sheep on one’s lawn, but at an agreeable distance and with none of the malodorous unsightliness that proximity would bring. Similarly, The Ha-Ha, the latest offering from poet David Kirby, is both an exploration of the ways in which the mind invites chaos yet keeps it at a distance and an apologia for humor, reflecting Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh’s observation that tragedy is merely underdeveloped comedy. Embracing wit, wide-ranging scholarship, and a love of travel as well as the pleasures of home, The Ha-Ha depicts comedy as a radical form of intelligence, a way of thinking that just happens to be noisy and rumbustious.
The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001
- 2004 Griffin International shortlist
- 2003 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.54
Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover’s quarrel with the world.
“Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry.”—Seamus Heaney
Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
