Special Collections
National Book Award Winners - Poetry
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Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror
by John AshberyA collection of poetry by John Ashbery.
Winner of the National Book Award.
Pulitzer Prize Winner
Time and Materials
by Robert HassThe 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 Czeslaw Milosz, 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 night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the New York Times Book Review wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and everything else, into his poetry."
Winner of the 2007 National Book Award for Poetry, and the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Head Off & Split
by Nikky FinneyWinner, 2011 National Book Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 GLCS Award for Poetry
Winner, 2012 SIBA Book Award for Poetry
Nominee, 2012 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Poetry
The poems in Nikky Finney’s breathtaking new collection Head Off & Split sustain a sensitive and intense dialogue with emblematic figures and events in African American life: from civil rights matriarch Rosa Parks to former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, from a brazen girl strung out on lightning to a terrified woman abandoned on a rooftop during Hurricane Katrina. Finney’s poetic voice is defined by an intimacy that holds a soft yet exacting eye on the erotic, on uncanny political and family events, like her mother’s wedding waltz with South Carolina senator Strom Thurmond, and then again on the heartbreaking hilarity of an American president’s final State of the Union address.
The Far Field
by Theodore RoethkeWith Roethke's sudden, tragic death in 1963, a great poetic career was brought to an untimely end. "The Far Field" presents the most rewarding of his many volumes of poetry, both in brilliance of style and inner meaning. All of the poems have appeared previously in periodicals such as "The Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Ladies' Home Journal, The New Yorker", and "The Partisan Review".
Winner of the National Book Award
What Work Is
by Philip Levine"This collection amounts to a hymn of praise for all the workers of America. These proletarian heroes, with names like Lonnie, Loo, Sweet Pea, and Packy, work the furnaces, forges, slag heaps, assembly lines, and loading docks at places with unglamorous names like Brass Craft or Feinberg and Breslin's First-Rate Plumbing and Plating. Only Studs Terkel's Working approaches the pathos and beauty of this book. But Levine's characters are also significant for their inner lives, not merely their jobs. They are unusually artistic, living 'at the borders of dreams.' One reads The Tempest 'slowly to himself'; another ponders a diagonal chalk line drawn by his teacher to suggest a triangle, the roof of a barn, or the mysterious separation of 'the dark from the dark.' What Work Is ranks as a major work by a major poet . . . very accessible and utterly American in tone and language." --Daniel L. Guillory, Library Journal
Winner of the National Book Award in 1991
Lighthead
by Terrance HayesWinner of the 2010 National Book Award for Poetry
In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural icons as diverse as Fela Kuti, Harriet Tubman, and Wallace Stevens appear with meditations on desire and history. We see Hayes testing the line between story and song in a series of stunning poems inspired by the Pecha Kucha, a Japanese presentation format. This innovative collection presents the light- headedness of a mind trying to pull against gravity and time. Fueled by an imagination that enlightens, delights, and ignites, Lighthead leaves us illuminated and scorched.
The Complete Poems 1927-1979
by Elizabeth BishopFrom the book: "So many stops and looks But never any listens For a poor man who traps A snowstorm that glistens."
Presentation Piece
by Marilyn HackerA collection of surreal poetry, arranged in five parts.
Winner of the National Book Award
Poems Seven
by Alan Dugan and Carl PhillipsPoems Seven: New and Complete Poetry, the winner of the National Book Award, presents the life work of a giant of American letters, tracks a forty-year career of honest, tough artistry, and shows a man at nearly 80 years of age and still at the height of his poetic power. Dugan's new poems continue his career-long concerns with renewed vigor: the poet's insistence that art is a grounded practice threatened by pretension, the wry wit, the jibes at the academic and sententious, and the arresting observations on the quotidian battles of life. All the while he peppers his poems with humorous images of the grim and daunting topics of existential emptiness.
Passing Through
by Stanley KunitzStanley Kunitz, one of the masters of contemporary poetry, presents his ninth collection, gathering a rich selection of his work, including new poems that remind us of his prefatory statement: "Art is the chalice into which we pour the wine of transcendence." Nearly all the poems of Kunitz's later years, beginning with The Testing-Tree (1971), are included, and most of the poems in Passing Through are unavailable in any other edition.
In "Touch Me," the last poem in the collection, Kunitz propounds a question, "What makes the engine go?" and gives us his answer: "Desire, desire, desire." These poems fairly hum with the energy, the excitement, the ardor, that make Kunitz one of our most enduring and highly honored poets. In the words of Carolyn Forché, "he is a living treasure."
Winner of the National Book Award
Blessing the Boats
by Lucille CliftonThis long-awaited collection from one of the most distinguished poets working today includes new poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from previous collections.
Winner of the National Book Award
Voyage of the Sable Venus
by Robin Coste LewisA stunning poetry debut: this meditation on the black female figure throughout time introduces us to a brave and penetrating new voice.
Robin Coste Lewis’s electrifying collection is a triptych that begins and ends with lyric poems considering the roles desire and race play in the construction of the self. The central panel is the title poem, “Voyage of the Sable Venus,” a riveting narrative made up entirely of titles of artworks from ancient times to the present—titles that feature or in some way comment on the black female figure in Western art. Bracketed by Lewis’s autobiographical poems, “Voyage” is a tender and shocking study of the fragmentary mysteries of stereotype, as it juxtaposes our names for things with what we actually see and know. Offering a new understanding of biography and the self, this collection questions just where, historically, do ideas about the black female figure truly begin—five hundred years ago, five thousand, or even longer? And what role has art played in this ancient, often heinous story? From the “Young Black Female Carrying / a Perfume Vase” to a “Little Brown Girl / Girl Standing in a Tree / First Day of Voluntary / School Integration,” this poet adores her culture and the beauty to be found within it. Yet she is also a cultural critic alert to the nuances of race and desire and how they define us all, including herself, as she explores her own sometimes painful history. Lewis’s book is a thrilling aesthetic anthem to the complexity of race—a full embrace of its pleasure and horror, in equal parts.
Winner of the National Book Award
Bewilderment
by David FerryWinner of the 2012 National Book Award for Poetry.
To read David Ferry's Bewilderment is to be reminded that poetry of the highest order can be made by the subtlest of means. The passionate nature and originality of Ferry's prosodic daring works astonishing transformations that take your breath away. In poem after poem, his diction modulates beautifully between plainspoken high eloquence and colloquial vigor, making his distinctive speech one of the most interesting and ravishing achievements of the past half century. Ferry has fully realized both the potential for vocal expressiveness in his phrasing and the way his phrasing plays against--and with--his genius for metrical variation. His vocal phrasing thus becomes an amazingly flexible instrument of psychological and spiritual inquiry. Most poets write inside a very narrow range of experience and feeling, whether in free or metered verse. But Ferry's use of meter tends to enhance the colloquial nature of his writing, while giving him access to an immense variety of feeling. Sometimes that feeling is so powerful it's like witnessing a volcanologist taking measurements in the midst of an eruption.
Ferry's translations, meanwhile, are amazingly acclimated English poems. Once his voice takes hold of them they are as bred in the bone as all his other work. And the translations in this book are vitally related to the original poems around them.
Incarnadine
by Mary SzybistIn Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning-for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry
An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 *
Words for the Wind
by Theodore RoethkeA collection of the Northwest poet's work up until 1958, which won the National Book Award in 1959. Roethke taught poetry and writing at the University of Washington.
Vice
by AiCollected here are poems from Ai's previous five books--Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate, and Greed--along with seventeen new poems. Employing her trademark ferocity, these new dramatic monologues continue to mine this award-winning poet's "often brilliant" (Chicago Tribune) vision.
Winner of the National Book Award
Life Studies and For the Union Dead
by Robert LowellThe title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.
Winner of the National Book Award
Country Music
by Charles Wright and David St. JohnCountry Music is comprised of eighty-eight poems selected from Charles Wright's first four books published between 1970 and 1977.
From his first book, The Grave of the Right Hand, to the extraordinary China Trace, this selection of early works represents "Charles Wright's grand passions: his desire to reclaim and redeem a personal past, to make a reckoning with his present, and to conjure the terms by which we might face the future," writes David St. John in the forward. These poems, powerful and moving in their own right, lend richness and insight to Wright's recently collected later works. "In Country Music we see the same explosive imagery, the same dismantled and concentric (or parallel) narratives, the same resolutely spiritual concerns that have become so familiar to us in Wright's more recent poetry," writes St. John.
Co-winner of the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry
Garbage
by A. R. AmmonsA book-length poem, "Garbage" is an epic of ideas: all life -- not that of human beings alone, but every species -- is shown to be part of an ultimate reality. Eternity is here and now. The argument ranges widely with a wealth of images taken from science, and the world around us, the writing by turns impassioned and witty.
Winner of the National Book Award
Paterson
by William Carlos Williams and Christopher J. MacgowanLong recognized as a masterpiece of modern American poetry, William Carlos Williams' "Paterson" is one man's testament and vision. "Paterson" is both a place -- the New Jersey city near which Williams lived -- and a man: the symbolic figure in whom the person (the poet's own life) and the public (the history of the region) are combined.
Winner of the National Book Award
Door in the Mountain
by Jean ValentineSince the 1965 publication of her first book, Dream Barker, selected for the Yale Younger Poets Award, Jean Valentine has published eight collections of poetry to critical acclaim. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems and includes a new collection, "Door in the Mountain."Valentine's poetry is as recognizable as the slant truth of a dream. She is a brave, unshirking poet who speaks with fire on the great subjects--love, and death, and the soul. Her images--strange, canny visions of the unknown self--clang with the authenticity of real experience. This is an urgent art that wants to heal what it touches, a poetry that wants to tell, intimately, the whole life.
Winner of the National Book Award
Diving into the Wreck
by Adrienne RichIn her seventh volume of poetry, Adrienne Rich searches to reclaim--to discover--what has been forgotten, lost, or unexplored.
"I came to explore the wreck. / The words are purposes. / The words are maps. / I came to see the damage that was done / and the treasures that prevail." These provocative poems move with the power of Rich's distinctive voice.
Winner of the National Book Award
Fire to Fire
by Mark DotyMark Doty's Fire to Fire collects the best of his seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought, as one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our time.
Winner of the National Book Award