Annal:2006 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2006. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2006 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.56
Kamau Brathwaite’s newest work, Born to Slow Horses, is a series of poetic meditations on islands and exile, language and ritual, and the force of personal and historical passions and griefs. These poems are haunted, figuratively and literally, by spirits of the African diaspora and drenched in the colors, sounds, and rhythms of the islands. But they also encompass the world of the exile and return, and the events of 9/11 in New York City. Brathwaite is one of the foremost voices in postcolonial inquiry and expression, and his poetry is densely rooted and…
Ashes for Breakfast: Selected Poems
Durs Grünbein, Michael Hofmann
- 2006 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.56
The first English translation of Germany’s leading contemporary poet.
…what is the whole surreal jokeshop
of terrors compared to the infinitely chance little
tricks of a poem. —from “MonoLogical Poem #1”
Born in Dresden in 1962, Durs Grünbein is the most significant and successful poet to emerge from the former East Germany, a place where, he wrote, “the best refuge was a closed mouth.” In unsettling, often funny, sometimes savage lines whose vivid images reflect his deep love for and connection with the…
Dunya Mikhail, Elizabeth Winslow
- 2006 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.56
“Yesterday I lost a country,” Dunya Mikhail writes in The War Works Hard, a revolutionary work by an exiled Iraqi poet—her first to appear in English. Amidst the ongoing atrocities in Iraq, here is an important new voice that rescues the human spirit from the ruins, unmasking the official glorification of war with telegraphic lexical austerity. Embracing literary traditions from ancient Mesopotamian mythology to Biblical and Qur’anic parables to Western modernism, Mikhail’s poetic vision transcends cultural and linguistic boundaries with liberating compassion.
- 2006 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.56
Michael Palmer has been hailed by John Ashbery as “exemplarily radical” and by The Village Voice as “the most influential avant-gardist working, and perhaps the greatest poet of his generation.” His new book, Company of Moths—a collection in four parts, “Stone,” “Scale,” “Company of Moths,” and “Dream”—is beautiful, and fierce: “bright archive, sad merriment,” “question pursuing question.” Palmer, in this new volume for our darkest times, asks, “How will you now read in the dark?”
