Annal:2009 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2009. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- <–2008
- Griffin Poetry Prize
- –end–
- 2009 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.59
C.D. Wright is one of America’s leading poets, an artist of idiosyncratic vision who demands ever more from words and poems. As Dave Eggers wrote in The New York Times, “C.D. Wright has been writing some of the greatest poetry-cum-prose you can find in American literature.”
Rising, Falling, Hovering is a work of profound social, political, and cultural consequence, a collection that uses experimental forms to climb within the unrest teeming around the world and inside the individual. “We are running on Aztec time,” she writes, “fifth and final cycle.”
In short lyrics and long sequences, Wright’s language is ever-sharpened with political ferocity as she overlays voices from the United States, Oaxaca, Baghdad, and the borderlands between nations, to reveal the human struggle for connection and justice during times of upheaval and grief.
If a body makes 1 centavo per chile picked or
5 cents for 50 chiles can Wal-Mex get it down to 3 cents. Pass the savings on to US.
Will they open a Supercenter in Falluja once it is pacified. Once the…
- 2009 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.59
The publication of a new book of poems by Derek Mahon is a momentous occasion. Life on Earth collects, and adds to, work which has appeared recently in limited editions. It opens with celebrations of notable exemplars: Coleridge, Chekhov, the novelist Brian Moore. This echo poetry extends to “Art Notes” on Hopper, de Staël and others, followed by the eco-poetry of the “Homage to Gaia” sequence on environmental themes. A substantial and positive volume distinguished by its light touch, Life on Earth is the work of a supreme artist.
- 2009 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.59
“No poet in Scotland now can take as his inspiration the folk impulse that created the ballads, the people’s songs, the legends of Mary Stuart and Prince Charlie,” proposed Edwin Muir. Yet many of the poems in Mick Imlah’s new collection do take the most over-worn of Scottish myths as their apparent starting points, spanning the Wallace and the Bruce; the Bonnie Prince (pivotal “Lost Leader” of the title), Robert Burns and Walter Scott; whisky, Clydeside and football. Imlah’s approach to this folklore is brilliantly fresh, a modern, sardonic but strongly-felt rendering of Scotland: from AD 500, by way of a guided tour of Iona, to yesterday at a Dumfries bus depot. And, as the chronicle reaches the twentieth century, the poems turn to friends and family—childhood reminiscences, elegies and celebrations—influenced still by sporting and military fantasy, the charm of history and the power of anachronism.
- 2009 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.59
When I saw you ahead I ran two blocks shouting your name then realizing it wasn’t you but some alarmed pretender, I went on running, shouting now into the sky, continuing your fame and luster. Since I’ve been incinerated, I’ve oft returned to this thought, that all things loved are pursued and never caught, even as you slept beside me you were flying off. At least what’s never had can’t be lost.
- <–2008
- Griffin Poetry Prize
- –end–
