New Criterion Series - Böcker

The fifth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Geoffrey Brock's Weighing Light. From the glinting scales in a painting by Vermeer to the white lines that disappear beneath a headlight's beam, Mr. Brock's poems measure out the often elusive weights and distances of the known world, confronting the unruly powers that threaten his burnished surfaces. His acute observations of landscape and of the smallest gestures that pass between people give rise to affecting human dramas both stark and deeply felt. Once read, his keen perceptions—all the more striking for the expertly cadenced music of his language and his supple use of poetic form—will be long remembered.

The sixth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Bill Coyle's The God of This World to His Prophet. Mr. Coyle's first collection of poems spans the divide between the minutely considered trappings of an often hard-bitten and desolate world and the larger, more elusive questions of belief. Shifting easily through registers of sober reflection, gentle satire, and even outright humor, his poems encompass landscape and dramatic situation with equal skill. Decoding the import in a stand of leafless trees or recounting the melancholy ruminations of a solitary figure in winter, Mr. Coyle finds "imaginings / projected on a darkened world of things." Also included are a number of poems translated from the Swedish that dovetail seamlessly with the author's own sensibility and concerns. His virtuosic mastery of prosodic forms, far from occluding his deeply felt subjects, reveals them to us with great force and immediacy. As Mr. Coyle puts it with characteristic precision and grace, "Artifice, at its heart, is the human touch describing / lucidly what the world, stripped to its essence, is."

The eighth winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize is Daniel Brown's Taking the Occasion. From its opening lines, his book sounds a new note in poetry: "The thing about the old one about / The tree in the forest and nobody's around / And how it falls maybe with a sound, / Maybe not . . ." In poem after poem, Mr. Brown plays urban speech rhythms (much as Robert Frost played rural ones) across the back-beat of meter and rhyme. Distinctive in matter as well as in manner, Taking the Occasion addresses subjects that range from a moment's fancy to stirring ruminations on existence. In a time when many poets see subjects as superfluous, Brown demonstrates the abiding power of an arresting premise, much as music derives life from a memorable tune. His work repeatedly sounds emotional or philosophical depths, yet he isn't above eliciting a laugh in the process.