Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets – serie

I greatly admire Alison Deming's lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken, I am more taken, by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge. I am amazed, and delighted, by her authority and tenacity. She is of this world; she lives in it, and for better or worse, it is the world she settles for; and she understands that, even if she must rage a little, and sometimes more than a little, she is one of its citizens. Like every original poet, she appears to have sprung full-blown, out of Zeus' head I want to say, but Aphrodite is here as well as Athena, the ocean as well as the mountain. I congratulate her on this fine book., Gerald SternAlison Hawthorne Deming brings to her first collection of verse the kinds of scrupulous observation and clear-eyed analysis that characterize scientific inquiry as well as a poet's eye for the telling moment.Science and Other Poems establishes astonishing parallels between the mute, inexorable processes of the physical universe and the dark mysteries of the human heart, parallels so clearly wrought and convincing that we wonder why we had not recognised them before.""Caffe Trieste"" lays bare the unexamined terror and sorrow that underlie the proliferation of faux fifties kitsch, then strips the veil of spacious grace from the decade and reveals it as it was for those who lived it:. . . bombs spread like bacteria on culture plates,when the cost of a family staying together mightbe Stelanize andhigh-voltage erasures. They're just American, all shine and no pain.In the chilling ""Alliance, Ohio,"" a mother and daughter suddenly find themselves stranded in a world of predators, a poisonous world charged with sexual threat, where every smile, every gesture, drips with sly menace.Yet moments of dislocation can also be cause for rejoicing, as when a speaker, after surprising a bat in the house, is moved to rapture by the sight of the night sky. Every page of Science and Other Poems is alive with startling juxtapositions, eerie parallels, abrupt shifts of tone, and image after image of crystalline perfection, as in this dazzling evocation of soft-shelled crabs: ""their finely stippled bodies that give to the touch, / translucent as Japanese lanterns.""These poems imbue everything, from the microscopic to the stellar, with wonder. Each instant of illumination, like poetry itself, brings the world alive with ""a faithfulness deeper than seeing.

This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning. - C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, ""What's life without the details?""Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in ""You Can't Have It All:""But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back. You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fledWhether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone - how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

Alice Fulton, the judge for the 1998 Walt Whitman Award, calls Once I Gazed at You in Wonder ""quite simply, the most endearing book I've read in some time."" Readers of this audacious and, yes, endearing collection will agree. Jan Heller Levi has said that her poems are not confessions but conversations. Here, then, are her conversations with the world. What sets Levi apart, however, is that she lets the world answer back. Difficult fathers, ineffectual mothers are forgiven; ex-lovers are blessed. Sophisticated but never jaded, this poet looks in wonder beyond the self: a cup of coffee in one of New York's ubiquitous Greek diners can launch Levi into a meditation on truth versus compassion; a suite of elegies for her mother takes us from a hospital corridor to the studio of a television talk show where God is the guest; a poetry reading in which she shares the stage with a folk singer illustrates Levi's gift for illuminating the absurd textures of late-twentieth-century existence.Don't you have any happy poems?he wondered.Don't you have any cancer songs?I asked.With the narrative drive of great fiction, the consolations of philosophy, and the rigor of art, Once I Gazed at You in Wonder marks the entrance of a much-needed new voice and vision in the conversation that is American poetry.

The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas' border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the harshness of her youth with the beauty, inventiveness, and musicality of language. Physical and emotional privation, familial violence, racial enmity, and recurrent death haunt Carolina Ghost Woods, which is set amid the lush landscape of the South and enfolds the wildness, inclement and consoling by turns, of nature and agriculture. Jordan, though, reveals compassion as well as passion for her subject matter and the people in her poems, creating lines of hope and chords of ecstatic energy out of despair: ""Yet another attempt to find what the guidebooks can't say / in this place smelling green-walnut bitter / and drifting up at each kicked leaf: / something that promises we will go on.""Expansive, ambitious, risk-taking, these narrative-lyrics, often elegiac, engage the timeless subjects of absence and distance, using metaphor in a way that surprises the reader to a different level of awareness, ""like the years / that have paused to rub their furred mouths against my leg and pass on."" An extraordinary rendering of the mystery, heat, and closeness of the undisclosed, Carolina Ghost Woods offers a poetry of witness that does not sacrifice the aesthetics of language and rhythm: ""Here I bring my sorrows / like the delft-blue mussel shells, / fingertip tiny, most beautiful when strewn wide with loss.

In poems of quiet force, Geri Doran maps the fragility of human connection and the irreducible fact of grief. From the communal ruptures of Chechnya and Rwanda to the personal dislocations that attend great loss, Resin weighs frailty against responsibility, damage against the desires of the heart. For the poet, a factory fire in late-nineteenth-century Portland becomes a tool for precise knowing: ""The phases of wood are a means / of dead reckoning: burn what is built / and gauge your passage / by what is lost."" Even in so quotidian an act as the planting of potatoes, Doran's sure, meticulous, and carefully calibrated lines reveal the intensity of our yearnings: ""What carried us from year to year was yield: / potatoes in, potatoes out, like rowing."" Variously plaintive, passionate, intuitive, and serious, the voice in Resin tells how the natural world, in both its wildness and regularity, expresses and mediates human longing.You entered me like migraine, leftlike migraine a private vacancy.The darkness outside is great and wild.Blue plums falling from an old treedemand we believe in wildness,fallingness. What's the matter is memory,shrivel and tart. How in this sweetaftermath of everything the mindshould settle on plums (blue plums!)is one of the mysteries. That Godand my window-blinds should conspireto refract the light to look like plums.Out in the wild nothing.- from ""Blue Plums

Half Wild is spiritual biography wound backwards, spiraling into the world rather than out of it. Though it reflects on the paradoxes of our violent times, Mary Rose O'Reilley's collection hangs on to life like the bee ""up to his hips in love"" who ""will fall asleep in the snow"" and ""wake up still kissing his flower."" In O'Reilley's poems, human, animal, and mineral creations interpenetrate and share surreal conversation - even stones exchange stories of ""hot times in the magma"" and animals are listened to intently. Here sacred inquiry is grounded in a passion for the natural world, resolving questions through lyric, erotic, and sensual response. The poems of Half Wild revel in desire and longing as instruments of theological critique. You were the part of me that gave itself to death. Sometimes I dream of eyes, sealed with a membrane of unknowing like a mystic's veil, that open to my glance without surprise. Sometimes I dream of perfect understanding. Sometimes I snatchat hands that seem to seek as through a caul. Sometimes I waken With an infant's shriek. - from ""Twin

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one's mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.

Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body. While one poem admonishes the reader to ""Forget the phonics / of the focal/fecal. Phrase, / fashion, and effuse,"" in another the speaker says, ""I refine my sense of / pain when you touch me / with something blue."" A preoccupation with the visual, artists, and artwork seeps through many of these imagistic minitexts. These poems look for release in descriptions of physical acts and in intricate manipulations of language. Sometimes they find it: ""Along comes the sentence to / break up the monotony of possession."" More often, though, the questions they pose resist answers: ""What extravagant / commodity is sex?"" and ""Which el- / lipsis omits love?"" Gender identification blurs as the poems probe theories of articulation and investigate the geographies of language and love. Through wordplay and word work, these poems travel a tightly crafted sphere of emotions and ideas.""Preposition""The before took us right up tothe after, even though undermeant we should not try over,from being stronger than to,up shying from its ascentin the face of down. I heldon to you and beside youI became with and about.In our around, the near/farcould turn away and toward,within the without. By my aboveand your below, the wheres andwhens retreated, leaving timeand space stranded, in off, on out.

I had a clock it woke all day, writes Jonathan Thirkield at the outset of The Waker's Corridor, a book that charts an assiduous attempt to recover lost time. Housed in elaborate and varied formal architectures, these poems navigate the disorder and gaps left by the violence of loss. All measures of time - psychological, personal, historical, numerical - collide and overlap in intensely lyrical verse. What results is a journey that winds through shifting lands and interiors, across theatrical stages and city streets, into voices and objects that emerge in sudden, vivid relief, and just as quickly disappear. By turns dreamlike and sternly rational, arcane and contemporary, intimate and dramatic, it is a book of blinding, austere, and beautiful awakenings.

In his award-winning first book, J. Michael Martinez reenvisions Latino poetics and its current conceptions of cultural identity. In Heredities, he opens a historically ravaged continental body through a metaphysical dissection into Being and silence. The hand manipulates a surgical etymology through the spine: the longitude where ""history gathers in the name we never are."" The poems seek to speak beyond codified aesthetics and dictated identity politics in order to recognise a territory of ""irreducible otherness"" where the self's sinew may be ""reeved through revelation"" and where, finally, one finds ""obscurity bonded to light."" This stunning collection heralds the arrival of an important new voice in American poetry.

The unusual voice encountered in Curses and Wishes carries a quiet, slightly elevated conversational tone, which flows from intimate secrets to wider social concerns. The poet has faith in economy and trusts in images to transfer knowledge that speech cannot. In Curses and Wishes the short, simple lines add up to a thoughtful book possessed with lyrical melancholy, a harmony of sadness and joy that sings: ""May happiness be a wheel, a lit throne, spinning / in the vast pinprick of darkness."" By the close of this ambitious work the poet has inspired readers to see the multifaceted effects of our human connections.

In this debut collection, Eyes, Stones, Elana Bell brings her heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The poems invoke characters inexorably linked to the land of Israel and Palestine. There is Zosha, a sharp-witted survivor whose burning hope for a Jewish homeland helps her endure the atrocities of the Holocaust. And there is Amal, a Palestinian whose family has worked their land for over one hundred years - through Turkish, British, Jordanian, and now Israeli rule. Other poems - inspired by interviews conducted by the poet in Israel, the Palestinian territories, and America - examine Jewish and Arab relationships to the land as biblical home, Zionist dream, modern state, and occupied territory.

Exactly a century ago, the Armory Show brought European avant-garde art to New York. We are still experiencing its consequences. Among the works on view was Marcel Duchamp's notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, which a derisive critic wanted to rename 'Explosion in a Shingle Factory.' Both titles come to mind as one reads Chris Hosea's Put Your Hands In, which somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top. Maybe that's because 'poetry is the cruelest month,' as he says, correcting T. S. Eliot. Transfixed in midparoxysm, the poems also remind us of Samuel Beckett's line (in Watt): 'The pain not yet pleasure, the pleasure not yet pain.' One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest. - John Ashbery, from his judge's citation for the Walt Whitman Award