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:

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.

One called him a nobody.
No, I said, he was a failure.
You can’t remember
a nobody’s name, that’s why
they’re called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.

—from “Failure”

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Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005

Robert Hass

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.

The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Tranströmer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surprisingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok…

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