Honor roll:Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. They are ranked by honors received.
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Desire: Poems
- 1998 Bobbitt Prize winner
- 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
- 1997 NBA–Poetry finalist
- 1997 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 28.48
I hate and—love. The sleepless body hammering a nail nails itself, hanging crucified.—from “Catullus: Excrucior”
In Frank Bidart’s collection of poems, the encounter with desire is the encounter with destiny. The first half contains some of Bidart’s most luminous and intimate work-poems about the art of writing, Eros, and the desolations and mirror of history (in a spectacular narrative based on Tacitus). The second half of the book exts the overt lyricism of the opening section into even more ambitious territory-”The Second Hour of the Night” may be Bidart’s most profound and complex meditation on the illusion of will, his most seductive dramatic poem to date.
Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest: Poems
B. H. Fairchild’s memory systems are the collective vision of America’s despairing dreamers—failed baseball players, oil field laborers, a surrealist priest, college boys at a burlesque theater, the last remaining cast members of The Wizard of Oz. Looming over all is the fact and the mystery of our continued renewal.
Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations
David Ferry’s Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations provides a wonderful gathering of the work of one of the great American poetic voices of the twentieth century. It brings together his new poems and translations, collected here for the first time; his books Strangers and Dwelling Places in their entirety; selections from his first book, On the Way to the Island; and selections from his celebrated translations of the Babylonian epic Gilgamesh, the Odes of Horace, and of Virgil’s Eclogues. This is Ferry’s fullest and most resonant book, demonstrating the depth and breadth of forty years of a life in poetry.
“Though Ferry is perhaps best known for his eloquent translations of Horace and Virgil, “Of No Country I Know” demonstrates that he deserves acclaim for his own poetry as well.” —Carmela Ciuraru, New York Times Book Review
Garbage: A Poem
In his first book of new poetry since Sumerian Vistas (1987), A. R. Ammons, one of America’s greatest living poets, uses an unlikely subject - garbage - as the occasion for a profound and often funny meditation on nature and mutability. Driving along I-95 in Florida the poet sights a smoldering mountain of the stuff and is moved to muse: “garbage has to be the poem of our time because / garbage is spiritual, believable enough to get our attention, getting in the way, piling up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and / creamy white: what else deflects us from the / errors of our illusionary ways…” Ammons proceeds to evoke with his unique blend of intellectual rigor and American sublimity the impersonal beauties of natural processes both microscopic and cosmic, including ruefully amusing observations on the vagaries of aging. He asks what place poetry and language might have in this vast system and finds startling correspondences: “our language is something to write home about; / but it is not the world: grooming does for / baboons most of what words do for us.” Never has the…
Felt: Poems
In this groundbreaking collection, Alice Fulton weds her celebrated linguistic freshness to a fierce emotional depth. Felt—a fabric made of tangled fibers—becomes a metaphor for the interweavings of humans, animals, and planet. But Felt is also the past tense of “feel.” This is a book of emotions both ordinary and untoward: the shadings of humiliation, obsession, love, and loneliness—as well as states so subtle they have yet to be named.
Reticent and passionate, elliptical yet avaiable, Fulton’s poems consider flaws and failure, touching and not touching. They are fascinated with proximity: the painter’s closeness to the canvas, the human kinship with animals, the fan’s nearness to the star.
Privacy, the opening and closing of doors, is at the heart of these poems that sing the forms of solitude—the meanings and feelings of virginity, the single-mindedness of fetishism, the tragedy of suicide.
Rather than accept the world as given, Fulton encounters invisible assumptions with magnitude and grace. Hers is a poetry of inconvenient knowledge, in which the surprises of…
“Few others in contemporary poetry are so brilliantly able to combine wit and weight, to charge the language so it virtually glows in the dark. Hicok’s poems just plain rock. They rock because they are gorgeous. They rock because they are sad and turn on the radio. They dance our ‘clumsy living’ with our shadows and our isolations to a music that always, always remembers the original delight in which ‘the feel of things, if [we] cherish, helps [us] live / more like a minute than a clock.’”—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
Present Company: Poems
In this new masterwork from one of America’s foremost poets, W.S. Merwin guides his readers to universal themes through worldly specifics. Akin to Neruda’s Elemental Odes, every poem in Present Company directly addresses the people and things of daily life, as in “To the Thief at the Airport” or “To Lingering Regrets.”
These poems to the world are playful, deadly serious, and full of wonder. Whether writing of an unused vehicle in “To Zbigniew Herbert’s Bicycle” or watching fireworks from a distance in “To the Coming Winter,” Merwin’s poems create a rare and compelling intimacy. There is no one writing today like W.S. Merwin.
Intensely serious beneath a surface of lightness and wit, Kenneth Koch’s poems “maintain power,” Denis Donoghue wrote, “by rarely choosing to exert it.” Koch’s virtuosity—he has written many plays, an extravagant novel (The Red Robins), and short stories (Hotel Lambosa), and has done numerous collaborations with painters—seems part of a continuing and energetic attempt to write (in the words of Ariosto) “things never said in prose before or in verse.” Almost every poem is a new kind of poem, a new flight—in this volume, for example, the theme and variations of “One Train May Hide Another,” the “poems by ships at sea,” the post-Apollinairean couplets of “A Time Zone,” the Chinese poetry-influenced quatrains of “The First Step,” and the hundred or so brief poems that together make up the poem “On Aesthetics.”
“Kenneth Koch, a unique poet, has continued to explain his ‘own idea of what made sense,’ writing poems for forty years, without ceasing to be human and funny, without ever forgetting what poetry is. The result, for the reader, is an…
The Continuous Life: Poems
Strand’s poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with “the weather of leavetaking”, but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit.
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