Annal:2004 Whitbread Book Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Whitbread Book Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2004 Whitbread-Poetry winner
- 2005 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 16.54
Corpus—Michael Symmons Roberts’ ambitious and inventive fourth collection—centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds—life and after-life, death and resurrection—encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in “Choreography”) and science (“Mapping the Genome”), these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the…
- 2004 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.54
These Days represents one of the most strikingly original debuts in recent years. A Gregory Award winner, Leontia Flynn—still in her twenties—writes about Belfast and the north of Ireland with a precision and tenderness that is completely fresh. While her subject matter ranges from memories of childhood to the instabilities of adulthood, from the raw domestic to the restless pull of “elsewhere”, her theme throughout is a search for physical and mental well-being, for a way to live a life. A number of exquisitely moving poems about her father highlight her…
- 2004 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.54
Ghosts is John Fuller’s fifteenth collection of poetry. In it he reckons with his own mortality, writing poems about the deaths of people he has known and the births of grandchildren, at the same time as looking forward to the time when he too will pass on. As always in his poetry, there is a probing into the meaning of life, a wonderfully melodic personal dialogue in which the poet asks and attempts to answer in the course of a poem some of life’s more mysterious questions. But such philosophical musings are always anchored in beautifully concrete,…
- 2004 Whitbread-Poetry shortlist
- Score: 6.54
In this sparkling debut, Matthew Hollis immerses us in the undercurrents of our lives. Love and loss are buoyed by a house full of milk, an orchard underwater, the laws of walking on water. Rainwater, floodwater, flux—the liquid landscapes which shift relentlessly in Ground Water—threaten and comfort by turns.
Matthew Hollis’s poems are brimming with courage in adversity as well as the promise of renewal, culminating in a powerful sequence about his father’s struggle with terminal illness. Ground Water is a startling first collection from a remarkable new poet.
