Winners and Judges
2008 Winner: Victoria Brockmeier for My Maiden Cowboy Names
Finalists:
Patty Seyburn,
Hilarity
Bill Mayer,
Articulate Matter
Sandy Tseng,
Leaving the City
2008 Judge—Grace Schulman
Judge's comments on Victoria Brockmeier's
My Maiden Cowboy Names:
This is magic. The poet’s passion for language will compel you to read on and on, eager to get to the next line, the next poem. With originality and inventiveness, urgency and joy, Brockmeier explores no less than the nature of our changing selves. She exalts the life of American farms and fields, hearing “so many tongues, so many startled throats,” and exclaims: “I want this poem to leave the taste / of the mud-salad ozarks in your mouth. / I want you to feel the mission in our voiceless soil.”
—Grace Schulman
2007 Winner: Carol V. Davis for Into the Arms of Pushkin: Poems of St. Petersburg
Finalists:
Lynn Aarti Chandhok,
The View from Zero Bridge
Jacqueline Berger,
Hundreds of Beautiful
Girls and Three Ugly Ones
Bill Wunder,
Pointing at the Moon
Bryan Penberthy,
lost-time incident
2007 Judge—Alberto Rios
Judge's comments on Carol V. Davis'
Into the Arms of Pushkin:
Russia centers this world, in person and at a distance both. The casual detail and patient telling add up everywhere, giving us meaning where difference had been. Showing us what this particular life in Russia feels like makes it our world, even when the speaker struggles to draw meaning from confusion or frustration. In one poem, the speaker tells of laying out the language of the next day on the back of the chair, quite as if it were clothing. We grasp this moment with depth, startled to make the connection between language and clothing. These are great moments in their small detail, abstractions given recognizable form. Finding meaning—a continual act of translation and its failure in so many things—propels the poems in this book. “I wait for a man I barely know / to return from a place I’ve never been.” That emptiness is replaced with substance, filling these pages, fed to us in “the hours between hours,” a time not time, but understanding itself, as something felt, something tasted, something given, if not freely. “Or perhaps no language at all, just a hand on a shoulder, / a reverse immigration.”
—Alberto Rios
Finalists:
Martin Earl,
Obscurity
Moira Linehan,
If No Moon
Immy Wallenfels,
The Anti-Nostalgia Riots
and Other Poems
Bill Wunder,
Pointing at the Moon
2006 Judge—Naomi Shihab Nye
Judge's comments on Rebecca Dunham's
The Miniature Room:
This deeply melodious and intelligent gathering of poems, both painterly and literary in context, bears a stunning lushness of language and vision. There's a mysterious pulse and scent permeating the exquisitely crafted, sometimes slightly ominous, images. Poems about a small son resonate inside a larger context—the wider natural world and all of civilization. One feels hypnotized inside a "slant" angle of perceptions unhampered by an intrusion of artifice.
The Miniature Room is a manuscript of profound intention and finesse.
- Finalists:
- Indigo Moor, Tap-Root
Jim Peterson, The Horse Who Bears Me Away
Jane Langley, Can't Take You Anywhere
Leonard Orr, Clouders
2005 Judge—Ishmael Reed
Judge's comments about Mona Lisa Saloy's Red Beans and Ricely Yours:
This poet has captured the street idioms and culture of New Orleans in a manner that challenge the tourist misconceptions about that fabulous city. She has also succeeded where many performance poets have failed. The poems are music to the ear as well as on the page.
—Ishmael Reed
- Finalists:
- Richard St. John, The Pure Inconstancy of Grace [Kant's Three Questions]
Julie Fay, Blue Scorpion
Terry Ann Thaxton, Getaway Girl
Judith Harway, Fortunes
2004 Judge—Diane Wakoski
Judge's comments on Michael Sowder's The Empty Boat:
This earthy yet elegant poet is a true heir to all the exciting poetry of the 20th century. Reading these poems, I felt the possible power of all poetry: a way of understanding and connecting to the primal and expanding universe. This poet, evolving from the American Modernists, transforms the ordinary into magic. A journey, a quest: I could not stop or be distracted from his path.
—Diane Wakoski
- Finalists:
- Daniel Bourne, Where No One Spoke the Language
Cynie Cory, Clink Street
Richard Lyons, Pure Geography and Trembling
Deborah Bogen, Landscape and Silos
2003 Judge—C. D. Wright
Judge's comments on Barbara Campbell's
Erotic Distance:
Erotic Distance is an unsettling confrontation with the unending entanglement between man, woman, and child. The poems are raised under a pressured field of plain nouns: room, light, mirror, birds, tree, earth, body. Occasionally the angles soften into circle, the body and the song unburdens itself. But "sitting unopposed in the trees outside thinking" is a privileged position, and the poems allow only the mercy loss can sustain, for as their author says, "I have com ea long way, to surrender my body / To the body of the horse." The singing burns and yet the days open into one, "Now, reach into the quiet for the name of the beloved / into the mouth of the apple." Who can refuse this chastened exhortation to love?
—C. D. Wright
- Finalists:
- Joshua Poteat, Ornithologies
G. A. O'Connell, The Force of Ice
Lisa Bickmore, Hymn
Patty Seyburn, Mechanical Cluster
2002 Judge—David Wagoner
Judge's comments on James Gurley's Human Cartography:
Its range of interest, its penetration of normal surfaces and limitations, its mature emotional balance make Human Cartography a very strong first book.
—David Wagoner
- Finalists:
- Glori Simmons, Graft [Manifesto for the Hands]
Daniel Bourne, Where No One Spoke the Language
Benjamin S. Grossberg, This Dream of Swimming the Hellespont
David Weiss, Vox Humana
2001 Judge—Lynne McMahon
Judge's comments on Christopher Bakken's After Greece:
The language is lucent, calm, introspective, and empathetic, never self-centered, and the questions about interpretations, history, the transitory nature of pleasure, and of seeming self-suficiency of objects I found important and compelling.
—Lynne McMahon
- Finalists:
- Deborah Warren, Just Above Our Frequency
Scott Brennan, The Contours of Fixation
Gaylord Brewer, Kill Everything
Bruce Meyer, Anywhere
2000 Judge—Dana Gioia
Judge's comments on H. L. Hix's Rational Numbers:
When I agreed to judge the T. S. Eliot Prize, it never occurred to me that I would find a book so ambitious, consummately achieved, and deeply unified as Rational Numbers.
—Dana Gioia
- Finalists:
- Jean Nordhaus, Dinner on the Fault Line
Jennifer Rose, The Old Direction of Heaven
Susan Donnelly, Transit
Carol Henrie, So Thin on the Bone -
- 1999 Judge—Mary Oliver
Judge's comments on David Keplinger's The Rose Inside:
This is a wide book and a deep one, alive with marvelous composition and outcry. And yet, for all its zest of expression it is real life and real feeling that is most honored.
—Mary Oliver
- Finalists:
- Charles Clifton, After the Rapture
Nathalie F. Anderson, Following Fred Astaire
Richard Moore, The Naked Scarecrow
Robert Lunday, The Wild Dust
A. M. Juster, Vulgarian at the Gate
Kathleen Aguero, Daughter of Sycorax
1998 Judge—X. J. Kennedy
Judge's comments on Rhina Espaillat's Where Horizons Go:
Poem after successful poem add up to an impressive total. Such developed skill and such mastery of rhyme and meter are certainly rare anymore; so is plainspeaking. All in all, it's a collection likely to persuade readers who think they don't like poetry that they do, after all.
—X. J. Kennedy
1997 Winner: William Baer for The Unfortunates
- Finalists:
- Ann Townsend, Dime Store Erotics
C. G. MacDonald, Human Noise
Jack Butler, The Lost Poems
Karen Krebser, Benedictine Hours
Andrew Glaze, Carnal Blessings
1997 Judge—Samuel Maio
Judge's comments on William Baer's The Unfortunates:
The Unfortunates is carefully and very well planned, structured on a moral premise distinguishing truth from falsehood, duty from expediency, and virtue from custom...all pointedly and dramatically illustrated through the many characterizations draw in [the book]: portraits, in essence, of the inhabitants of Eliot's "Waste Land," here in full life at the end of the century.
—Samual Maio