Honor roll:Poetry books

An Atlas of the Difficult World: Poems 1988-1991

Adrienne Rich

• 1992 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1992 Lenore Marshall winner
• 1992 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 1991 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 32.42

“This is no place you ever knew me,” writes Adrienne Rich in her major new work, “…These are not the roads/you knew me by.” As always in her forty-year career, this major poet has mapped out new territory , astonishing and enlightening us with her penetrating insight into our lives amid the beauties and cruelties of our difficult world.

Black Zodiac

Charles Wright

• 1998 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1997 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1997 NBCC–Poetry winner
• Score: 30.48

Black Zodiac offers poems suffused with spiritual longing—lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality. The poems also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Approaching his vast subjects by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal truths much larger than the quotidian happenings that engendered them. His is an astonishing, flexible, domestic-yet-universal verse. As the critic Helen Vendler has observed, Wright is a poet who “sounds like nobody else.”

Desire: Poems

Frank Bidart

• 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.

Refusing Heaven: Poems

Jack Gilbert

• 2005 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 2005 NBCC–Poetry winner
• 2006 Lenore Marshall shortlist
• Score: 26.55

More than a decade after Jack Gilbert’s The Great Fires, this highly anticipated new collection shows the continued development of a poet who has remained fierce in his avoidance of the beaten path. In Refusing Heaven, Gilbert writes compellingly about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings: “The days and nights wasted…Long hot afternoons / watching ants while the cicadas railed / in the Chinese elm about the brevity of life.” Time slows down in these poems, as Gilbert creates an aura of curiosity and wonder at the fact of existence itself.

Despite powerful intermittent griefs—over the women he has parted from or the one lost to cancer (an experience he captures with intimate precision)—Gilbert’s choice in this volume is to “refuse heaven.” He prefers this life, with its struggle and alienation and delight, to any paradise. His work is both a rebellious assertion of the call to clarity and a profound affirmation of the world in all its aspects. It braces the reader in its humanity and heart.

Repair: Poems

C.K. Williams

• 2000 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1999 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1999 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 26.5

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams’s sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life’s easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: “the poetry of the sentence.”

Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems

Yusef Komunyakaa

• 1994 Kingsley Tufts winner
• 1994 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
• 1993 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• Score: 26.44

A collection of poems from the author’s earlier books combined with a dozen new poems interweave memory and history.

My Alexandria: Poems

Mark Doty

• 1993 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 1993 NBCC–Poetry winner
• 1993 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 26.43

One of the most highly praised and touching collections of poems to appear in recent years. In selecting it for the National Poetry Series, Philip Levine said: “The courage of this book is that it looks away from nothing: the miracle is that wherever it looks it finds poetry… Mark Doty is a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music.”

Watching the Spring Festival: Poems

Frank Bidart

• 2008 LATimes–Poetry winner
• 2009 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 2008 NBA–Poetry finalist
• Score: 22.58

This is Frank Bidart’s first book of lyrics—his first book not dominated by long poems. Narrative elaboration becomes speed and song. Less embattled than earlier work, less actively violent, these new poems have, by conceding time’s finalities and triumphs, acquired a dark radiance unlike anything seen before in Bidart’s long career.

Mortality—imminent, not theoretical—forces the self to question the relation between the actual life lived and what was once the promise of transformation. This plays out against a broad landscape. The book opens with Marilyn Monroe, followed by the glamour of the eighth-century Chinese imperial court (seen through the eyes of one of China’s greatest poets, Tu Fu). At the center of the book is an ambitious meditation on the Russian ballerina Ulanova, Giselle, and the nature of tragedy. All this gives new dimension and poignance to Bidart’s recurring preoccupation with the human need to leave behind some record or emblem, a made thing that stands, in the face of death, for the possibilities of art.

Bidart, winner of the 2007 Bollingen…

Ooga-Booga

Frederick Seidel

• 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).

Middle Earth: Poems

Henri Cole

• 2004 Kingsley Tufts winner
• 2004 Pulitzer–Poetry finalist
• 2003 LATimes–Poetry finalist
• Score: 22.54

In his fifth collection of verse, Henri Cole’s melodious lines are written in an open style that is both erotic and visionary. Few poets so thrillingly portray the physical world, or man’s creaturely self, or the cycling strain of desire and self-reproach. Few poets so movingly evoke the human quest of “a man alone,” trying “to say something true that has body, / because it is proof of his existence.” Middle Earth is a revelatory collection, the finest work yet from an author of poems that are “marvels—unbuttoned, riveting, dramatic—burned into being” (Tina Barr, Boston Review).