Annal:2007 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Native Guard: Poems
- 2007 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.57
Natasha Trethewey’s muscular, luminous poems explore the complex memory of the American South history that belongs to all Americans.
The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the Native Guard, one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In Trethewey’s hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. Native Guard is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as Trethewey skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices. Interwoven are poems honoring Trethewey’s mother and recalling her fraught childhoodher parents" interracial marriage was still illegal in 1966 Mississippi.
Native Guard is a haunting, beguiling narrative, caught in the intersections of public and personal testament. As Rita Dove proclaimed, “Here is a young poet in full possession of her craft.”
Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004
- 2007 Lenore Marshall shortlist
- 2007 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.57
Interrogation Palace is a career-spanning selection of work from an important American poet, drawing upon each of David Wojahn’s six previous collections and a substantial gathering of new work. Moving fluently from personal history to public history, and from high culture to popular culture, Wojahn’s searching and restless poetry has been considerably acclaimed, both for the candor of its testimony and the authority of its formal invention. He is above all an elegiac poet, tender and ferocious by turns, whether mourning the loss of family and loved ones or the hopes and aspirations of the baby-boomer era. Interrogation Palace confirms David Wojahn’s status as one of the most inventive, passionate, and ambitious figures of his generation.
The Republic of Poetry: Poems
- 2007 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.57
The heart of this collection is a cycle of Chile poems by “the Pablo Neruda of North American authors” (Sandra Cisneros).
In his eighth collection of poems, Martin Espada celebrates the power of poetry itself. The Republic of Poetry is a place of odes and elegies, collective memory and hidden history, miraculous happenings and redemptive justice. Here poets return from the dead, visit in dreams, even rent a helicopter to drop poems on bookmarks.
