Annal:2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award 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 down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself.
Despite powerful intermittent griefs—over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)—Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.
The Shout: Selected Poems
- 2005 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.55
Simon Armitage is one of Britain’s most respected poets. He is considered Philip Larkin’s successor in both the easy brilliance of his verse and the national acclaim he has received. His subjects have ranged from yardwork to politics, from the fidelity of dogs to the negotiations of lovers. A selection of poetry that is wry, unpretentious, and constantly inventive, The Shout collects Armitage’s best work from the past three decades and includes many of his most recent poems.
Man with a Golf Ball Heart They set about him with a knife and fork, I heard,
and spooned it out. Dunlop, dimpled, perfectly hard.
It bounced on stone but not on softer ground-they made
a note of that. They slit the skin-a leathery,
rubbery, eyelid thing-and further in, three miles
of gut or string, elastic. Inside that, a pouch
or sac of pearl-white balm or gloss, like Copydex.
It weighed in at the low end of the litmus test
but wouldn’t burn, and tasted bitter, bad, resin
perhaps from a tree or plant. And it gave off gas
that caused…
- 2004 Younger Poets winner
- 2005 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.54
Richard Siken’s Crush, selected as this year’s winner of the Yale Younger Poets prize, is a powerful collection of poems driven by obsession. Siken writes with ferocity, and his reader hurtles unstoppably with him. His poetry is confessional, gay, savage, and charged with violent eroticism.
In her introduction to the book, competition judge Louise Glück hails the “cumulative, driving, apocalyptic power, [and] purgatorial recklessness” of Siken’s poems. She notes, “Books of this kind dream big…. They restore to poetry that sense of crucial moment and crucial utterance which may indeed be the great genius of the form.”
The Incentive of the Maggot: Poems
- 2006 Lenore Marshall shortlist
- 2005 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.56
In his prize-winning debut collection, Ron Slate seeks out the intersections of art, technology, and humanity with intelligence, wit, and fervor. His unique voice is informed by his world travels as a business executive. As Robert Pinsky writes in his introduction, Slate “brings together the personal and the global in a way that is distinctive, subtle, defying expectations about what is political and what is personal.” In Slate’s words, “Is this the end of the world? / No just the end / of the language that describes it.”
Recently published in The New Yorker, Slate has been praised by James Longenbach for his ability to “make the known world seem wickedly strange—a poetry that is utterly of the moment, our moment, because it sounds like nobody else.”
