Annal:2005 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Selected Poems: 1963-2003
- 2005 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.55
Serbian by birth, brought up under Nazi occupation and transplanted to America in his teens, Charles Simic has had the opportunity to distill a highly particular vision of the world, in which comic gaiety goes hand in hand with the recognition of our darker spiritual and philosophical problems. Blending the real and the surreal, the urbane and the uncanny, Simic’s poems construct a neighbourhood of experience that is estranged yet recognisably at home with its surroundings. He notes what the eye sees and what the subsconscious has to say on the matter, in a…
On the Ground: Poems
- 2005 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Fanny Howe’s bold new collection responds to the contrast between American imperialist goals and the realities of life lived “on the ground.” While our minds are preoccupied with the war games on television, we go on living among our ordinary joys and appetites. How can we live under these dissonant conditions and reconcile our existence with our longings?
- 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…
- 2005 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.55
Matthew Rohrer’s simple, hilarious, generous and strangely disquieting poems conjure versions of the most familiar aspects of our lives-friendship, marriage, childhood, work-into which intrude incongruous, peculiar, fantastical, yet somehow totally recognizable elements. Over and over these poems leave us convinced that we’ve learned something very important and mysterious, yet we can’t say exactly what.
