Honor roll:Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Each of these books has been nominated for a Griffin Poetry Prize – International. They are ranked by honors received.
You may also enjoy these honor rolls:
- Works 1–10 of 36
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 2007 Griffin International shortlist
- 2006 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.56
From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from “the most frightening American poet ever” (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems
Paul Muldoon’s ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne…
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
Rodney Jones has been called “the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry” (Southern Review). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four new pieces. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. There is no subject that he will not touch, and in his detailed vision of his Alabama childhood, he ennobles a misunderstood community. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”
Corpus—Michael Symmons Roberts’ ambitious and inventive fourth collection—centres around the body. Mystical, philosophical and erotic, the bodies in these poems move between different worlds—life and after-life, death and resurrection—encountering pathologists’ blades, geneticists’ maps and the wounds of love and war. Equally at ease with scripture (Jacob wrestling the Angel in “Choreography”) and science (“Mapping the Genome”), these poems are a thrilling blend of modern and ancient wisdom, a profound and lyrical exploration of the mysteries of the body:
So the martyrs took the lamb.
It tasted rich, steeped in essence
Of anchovy. They picked it clean
And found within, a goose, its pink
Beak in the lamb’s mouth like a tongue.
Ranging effortlessly between the physical extremes of death—from putrefaction to purification—and life—drought and flood, hunger and satiation—the poems in Corpus speak most movingly of “living the half-life between two elements”, of what it is to be unique and luminously alive.
Notes from the Divided Country: Poems
In her first collection, Suji Kwock Kim confronts some of the most difficult, most unanswerable questions—colonialism, the Korean War, emigration, racism, love. She considers what a homeland would be, for a divided nation and divided self: what it means to enter language, the body, the family, the community; to be a daughter, sister, lover, citizen or exile.
In settings from New York to San Francisco, Scotland to Seoul, her poems question “what threads hold/our lives together” in cities and gardens, battlefields and small towns. Across the no-man’s-land between every “you” and “I,” her speakers encounter, quarrel with, or honor others, traveling between the living and the dead, between horror over the disastrous events of the past, and hope for the future.
With its wide range of voices, styles and perspectives, Notes from the Divided Country bears witness to the vanishing world.
Selected Poems: Selected Poems
One of the best and most respected experimental poets in the United States, Fanny Howe has published more than twenty books, mostly with small presses, and this publication of her selected poems is a major event.
Howe’s theme is the exile of the spirit in this world and the painfully exciting, tiny margin in which movement out of exile is imaginable and perhaps possible. Her best poems are simultaneously investigations of that possibility and protests against the difficulty of salvation.
Boston is the setting of some of the early poems, and Ireland, the birthplace of Howe’s mother, is the home of O’Clock, a spiritually piquant series of short poems included in Selected Poems.
The metaphysics and the physics of this world play off each other in these poems, and there is a toughness to Howe’s unique, fertile nervousness of spirit. Her spare style makes a nest for the soul:
Zero built a nest
in my navel. Incurable…
Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems
“Elaine Equi’s narrow lines are like the rungs of a ladder that one ascends while one is descending them. It’s a motion like that in Wang Wei’s lines, Stars / float up / toward dawn,‘ which she quotes in her cento, Wang Wei’s Moon.’ Or, as she beautifully puts it, Discreetly a breeze enters the room.’”-John Ashbery
Ripple Effect showcases thirty years of Elaine Equi’s investigations into our cultural obsessions. Vivid, savvy, and accessible, her poems can transform almost anything-a list, a diary entry, advertising speak-into sophisticated, germane elixirs of pop culture and high art. Widely published, these poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry.
The Owner of the House: New Collected Poems 1940-2001
Few poets have so artfully confronted American life as Louis Simpson. Persona speakers struggle with everyday issues against a backdrop of larger forces, the individual’s maladjustment to a culture of materialism and brutal competition, the failure of marriage under the pressures of such a society, the failure of the American dream. Simpson wages a lover’s quarrel with the world.
“Louis Simpson has perfect pitch. His poems win us first by their drama, their ways of voicing our ways . . . of making do with our lives. Then his intelligence cajoles us to the brink of a cliff of solitude and we step over into the buoyant element of true poetry.”—Seamus Heaney
Educated at Munro College (West Indies) and at Columbia University, Louis Simpson has taught widely, most recently at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of seventeen books of poetry and ten works of prose. He has received fellowships from the Academy of American Poetry, the Hudson Review, the Guggenheim Foundation, and received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
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…
Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems
His long-awaited volume, a new selection of his later poems, spans ten major collections by one of America’s most visionary and influential poets. Chosen by the author himself, the poems in Notes from the Air represent John Ashbery’s best work from the past two decades, from the critically acclaimed April Galleons and Flow Chart to the 2005 National Book Award finalist Where Shall I Wander.
While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial…
- Works 1–10 of 36
- Show titles only
- Next 10 –>
