2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner
2009 National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Poetry

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry …More

2009 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry Winner

Merwin is American poetry's eminence gris--winner of every major literary prize this country offers. …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 - 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

A driven immigrant father, an old poet, Isaac Babel in the author's dreams--Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too--family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"--and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America's great poets. One called him a nobody.No, I said, he was a failure.You can't remembera nobody's name, that's whythey're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable. --from "FAILURE" …More

Natasha Trethewey's muscular, luminous poems explore the complex memory of the American South--history that belongs to all Americans. The sequence forming the spine of the collection follows the Native Guards, one of the first black regiments mustered into service in the Civil War. In Trethewey's hometown of Gulfport, Mississippi, a plaque honors Confederate POWs, but there is no memorial to these vanguard Union soldiers. Native Guard is both a pilgrimage and an elegy, as Trethewey skillfully employs a variety of poetic forms to create a lyrical monument to these forgotten voices. …More

A Woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Advertising. …More

Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In "Delights and Shadows," Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman's trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.

"Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."-"Poetry"

Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska. …More

In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal. As he watches the "Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window," he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding "what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours, - / but the world / will be filled with the living." In prayerlike poems he invokes the one "who spoke the world / into being" and celebrates a dazzling universe-snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for "the only animal that commits suicide," and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods. …More

A glittering new collection from "the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War" ("The Times Literary Supplement) 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 along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age. …More

The rambling free-verse poems in Carl Dennis's eighth collection use religious myths and metaphors as a lens through which to view the smaller, more ordinary experiences of daily life -- practical experiences, the poet shows us, which also offer personal enrichment and spiritual rewards. …More

In His Eleventh volume, Stephen Dunn explores the "different hours" not only of a life but also of the historical and philosophical landscape beyond the personal. …More

Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets
""Always, "These gigantic inconceivables.""
"Always, "What will have been done to me?""
"And so we don our mental armor, "
"flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should."
"A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk, "
"though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?""
--from "Risk"
"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."
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Former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand writes poems that weave between abstraction and the detailed particulars of actual experience. His poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. Strand makes reading poetry a joy, even for those who prefer prose. …More

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award
"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."
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A major collection of poetry brings together works from the poet's first five works: Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism. Reprint. …More