Annal:2005 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2005. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Refusing Heaven: Poems
- 2005 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 2005 NBCC–Poetry winner
- 2006 Lenore Marshall shortlist
- Score: 26.55
More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted…Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows…
Luck Is Luck: Poems
- 2006 Kingsley Tufts winner
- 2005 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.56
From the snowy egret to a woman’s floating rib, nudism in America to Holy Communion, Simone de Beauvoir to Nathan’s hot dogs–the subjects in Lucia Perillo’s fourth collection of poetry lift off from surprising places and touch down on new ground. Hers is a vision like no other. In “To My Big Nose,” she muses: “hard to imagine what the world would have looked like / if not seen through your pink shadow. / You who are built from random parts / like a mythical creature—a gryphon or sphinx.”
Fearless, focused, ironic, irreverent, truly and deeply felt, the poems…
Pennyweight Windows: New & Selected Poems
- 2005 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.55
For over 20 years, Donald Revell has used the pastoral as a tool of protest/revolution against violence and war and as a guide to peace, arguing for personal, natural and political growth in precise, delicate lyrics. Pennyweight Windows: New and Selected Poems includes a powerful new group of poems and much of the finest work from Revell’s eight previous collections. Strong political and antiwar themes make this collection highly relevant to today’s most important cultural and political debates.
From The Pennyweight Woods I ran into…
The Cachoeira Tales and Other Poems
- 2005 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.55
Soaring images, rhythmic language, and wry humor come together in these three narrative poems that explore travel from an African American historical and social perspective. A cab ride turns into an amazing encounter with the driver, an amateur physicist whose ideas about space and time travel spark the poet’s musings on chutzpah and artistic ambition. A trip to Triolet, a Creole village in the Indian Ocean island nation of Mauritius, leads the poet to ponder the past and present as she reflects on the ironic complexities of the slave trade and its legacy shared…
Zeppo's First Wife: New and Selected Poems
- 2005 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.55
from Enormously Sad
…Sad, so sad-compared to what?
To your earlier more oblivious state?
It never was oblivious enough-
always those presentiments of sadness
prickling the limbic. Now a voice says, Get outside
yourself, go walk on the flats. The tide’s gone out—
but your little metal detector will detect little metallic coins
of enormous sadness in the teeming wet sand,
and then, the tide will come back, erasing, cleansing!
And you, standing there in the salty…
