Annal:2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2008. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- <–2007
- Pulitzer Prize
- –end–
Failure: Poems
- 2008 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.58
A driven immigrant father, an old poet, Isaac Babel in the author’s dreams—Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too—family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, “when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything”—and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America’s great poets.
Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005
- 2008 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- 2007 NBA–Poetry winner
- Score: 20.58
The poems in Robert Hass’s new collection—his first to appear in a decade—are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.
His familiar landscapes are here—San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country—in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.
Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006
- 2008 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 2007 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.58
This collection arranges poems from the author’s six highly praised books alongside a group of astonishing new pieces.
