Annal:2004 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.54
In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the “Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window,” he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding “what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours,– / but the world / will be filled with the living.” In prayerlike poems he invokes the one “who spoke the world / into being” and celebrates a dazzling universe–snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September…
Middle Earth: Poems
- 2004 Kingsley Tufts winner
- 2004 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 2003 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.54
In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole’s melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man’s creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of “a man alone,” trying “to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence.” Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are “marvels—unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic—burned into being” (Tina Barr, Boston Review).
- 2004 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.54
Heather McHugh’s new book, Eyeshot, is a brooding, visionary work that takes aim at the big questions—love and death. The poems suggest that such immensities balance on the smallest details, and that a range of human blindness is inescapable. The power of this new work comes from its delicate yet tenacious fidelity to the everunfolding senses of sense. The poems invite the reader to follow careening words and insights through passages both playful and profound. Her “Fido, Jolted by Jove” reveals the tension endemic to both language and living: “the world itself…
