Friday, October 12, 2007

National Book Award Finalists in Poetry


We still have a signed copy of Ellen Bryant Voigt's MESSENGER on hand here at Kingdom Books, and we'll be adding the rest of these titles over the next week or so. I love wrestling with the top picks and hypothesizing about what gets them onto the short list. With Voigt's collection, there are some quick answers: It's a lifetime survey of her work, jammed with poems that evoke lasting responses, and the new work in the final section is dense and provocative. More later on the other four...

POETRY

Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company)
Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins)
David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press)
Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company)
Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006
(W.W. Norton & Company)

Poetry Judges: Charles Simic (chair), Linda Bierds, David St. John,
Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey.

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