WINNER
TIME AND MATERIALS Poems, 1997-2005 | ROBERT HASS: Hass's
first collection in a decade explores art, memory, the beauty of the
natural world (from California to Berlin to Mexico), mass violence,
American culture, and our inexorable march in a baffling, constantly
changing world. (EXCELLENT page 65)
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"The poems' amplitude measures up to their classic
subject: the passage of time, on both historical and personal levels.
... These masterly, compressed poems from Hass's book indicate the
scope and sharpness of the whole." ROBERT PINSKY, WASHINGTON POST
MAGNETIC NORTH | LINDA GREGERSON: Art, nature, religion, loss, the
metaphysical, and a universal order occupy the fertile mind of
Gregerson, who admits that "The world so rarely/lets us in."
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"Mastering complexity is beautiful, a great human pleasure.
... Gregerson's attractive work demonstrates that muscular thinking
is not only desirable but needed, giving weight and meaning to emotion.
Thinking gives us reality." ROBERT PINSKY, WASHINGTON POST
THE HOUSE ON BOULEVARD ST. New and Selected Poems | DAVID KIRBY:
Roughly organized into dreams, Kirby's long-lined, hilarious poems
cover the gamut of everyday topics--from art to youth to home.
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"Kirby believes in the seamlessness of 'high' and
'low' art; his poems are filled with references to everyone
from Fats Domino and Garth Brooks to Keats and Sylvia Plath. ... [He]
writes long-lined and loose narrative poems that read like talky,
whimsical, jokey prose ... 'perfect for those who say they
don't like poetry.'" CAROL MUSKE -DUKES, NEW YORK TIMES
BOOK REVIEW
OLD HEART Poems | STANLEY PLUMLY: Focusing on the natural world,
many of these poems depict the colorful, multifaceted seasons of Europe
and the American East Coast; others portray mortality, both beautiful
and morbid.
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"The interplay between words and reality, mortal imagination
and the lasting world, shimmers in these poems." ROBERT PINSKY,
WASHINGT ON POST
MESSENGER New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 | ELLEN BRYANT VOIGT:
Samplings from six previous collections, as well as new poems, focus on
rural landscape, elegiac monologues, and ruminations on home life and
those persons close to the poet.
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"Voigt strikes me as a writer that readers will simultaneously
be beguiled by and surprised by: She speaks the bald truths of family
life, of country life, of relations between people. ... Frequently, her
knowledge of the natural world and of mythology is impressive."
PATRICIA CLARK, GRAND RAPIDS PRESS
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