2009 National Book Award Winner-Poetry

"Keith Waldrop is one of the freshest, strongest poets in our language. "Transcendental Studies" shows how good he really is. Intelligence and lyricism live together in his work, exalted intellect and sly cunning, playfulness and heartbreak, they all dance together, sometimes with postmodern angularity, sometimes with a sort of Horatian civility. I open the book and read and just want to go on. Waldrop's mastery is not just of the local text, but of that great animal, the book."--Robert Kelly, author of "The Book from the Sky"
"These haunts, thought haunts really, leave their melodies on Keith Waldrop's great poem arrays. A frequent wonder. Tune slowly to taste."--Clark Coolidge, author of "The Act of Providence"
"Keith Waldrop has concerned himself with the topology of the world of writing more consistently and valuably than any poet I can think of since the late Paul Celan. There is, in Waldrop's work, a steady thought directed to the way that we make our way in the world by thinking and speaking. Where Wallace Stevens gave us the portrait of a man bothered by the march of ants through his shadow, Waldrop gives us the disturbances of the world in its representations."--A. L. Nielsen, "Gargoyle"
"Along with iridescent things these cycles of eccentrically drifting poems tell of our oceanic and domestic spaces for life and death, it is the phrasing itself that shows Keith Waldrop's artistry. Discrete but dreamlike, the phrasing is every poem's heartbeat. While its leaps and glides take metaphysics home at last, it is the writing, not that of a conjuror but the word as such (as elsewhere in Waldrop's outrageously funny poems), that fascinates. Here is a poet still against the grain and of authentic madcap modernity."--Christopher Middleton, author of "Collected Poems" …More

2008 National Book Award- Winner Poetry

Mark Doty's "Fire to Fire" collects the best of Mark Doty's seven books of poetry, along with a generous selection of new work. Doty's subjects--our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives--echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times. …More

Winner - 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
National Book Critics Circle Best Recommended Poetry
Winner - 2007 National Book Award for Poetry

In his first poetry collection in a decade, former poet laureate Hass is in great form, simultaneously blithe and commanding. …More

Winner - 2006 National Book Award for Poetry
Part antiphonal rant, part rhythmic whisper, Nathaniel Mackey's new collection of poems, Splay Anthem, takes the reader to uncharted poetic spaces. Divided into three sections--"Braid," "Fray," and "Nub"--Splay Anthem weaves together two ongoing serial poems Mackey has been writing for over twenty years, Song of the Andoumboulou and "Mu". …More

Winner - 2005 National Book Award for Poetry
This definitive volume by one of America's greatest poets is essential for all poetry collections. …More

Winner - 2004 National Book Award for Poetry
A wide range of works and emotions are exhibited in this collection, from short peices displaying basic feelings, to longer stories about companionship and disappointments. …More

Winner-2003 National Book Award For Poetry
New work from the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of "Repair
. . . Reality has put itself so solidly before me
there's little need for mystery . . . Except for us, for how we take the world
to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.
--from "The World"
In his first volume since "Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity--the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events--with an intensity and drive that recall not only his recent work but also his early books, published forty years ago. He gazes at a Rembrandt self-portrait, and from it fashions a self-portrait of his own. He ponders an "anatomical effigy" at the Museum of Mankind, an in so doing "dissects" our common humanity. Stoking a fire at a house in the country, he recalls a friend who was burned horribly in war, and then turns, with eloquence and authority, to contemporary life during wartime, asking "how those with power over us can effect these things, by what cynical reasoning do they pardon themselves." "The Singing is a direct and resonant book: touching, searching, heartfelt, permanent.
…More

Winner-2002 National Book Award For Poetry
Ruth Stone has rightly been called America's Akhmatova, and she is considered "Mother Poet" to many contemporary writers. In this, her eighth volume, she writes with crackling intelligence, interrogating history from the vantage point of an aging and impoverished woman. Wise, sardonic, crafty, and misleadingly simple, Stone loves heavy themes but loathes heavy poems. …More

Winner-2001 National Book Award For Poetry
In this collection chronicling a 40-year career and its shifting concerns, Alan Dugan adds to his body of work with nearly three dozen new poems. Eloquent, blunt, funny, or bitter, the poet comments on every facet of life. As Stanley Plumly noted when presenting the 2001 National Book Award for Poems Seven: "[Dugan's] crucial honesty -- as much as his resolute art -- is irresistible." …More

Winner-2000 National Book Award For Poetry
This long-awaited collection by one of the most distinguished poets writing today includes new poems written during the past four years as well as generous selections from Lucille Clifton's award-winning collections Next: New Poems, Quilting, The Book of Light and The Terrible Stories. Clifton employs brilliantly honed language, stunning images and sharp rhythms to address the whole of human experience: birth, death, children, family, illness, sexuality, spirituality and injustice in antebellum and contemporary America. Hers is a poetry that is passionate and wise, not afraid to rage or whisper. …More

Winner - 1999 National Book Awards for Poetry
Collected here are poems from Ai's previous five books--"Cruelty, Killing Floor, Sin, Fate" and "Greed"--along with 17 new poems employing her trademark ferocity. …More

Winner - 1998 National Book Awards for Poetry
An exhilarating new collection by the poet often acclaimed as the modern Walt Whitman is "remarkable for its generosity of spirit, manifested in a warm surrealism that is often turned with humor toward his own past" ("Publishers Weekly"). …More