Annal:2000 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2000. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Carolina Ghost Woods: Poems
- 2000 NBCC–Poetry winner
- 1999 Walt Whitman winner
- Score: 20.5
“A startling first collection of poems—startling because of bone-crushing violence and poverty and startling also because of the beautiful and precise language the poet brings on these scenes, violent or not…. The genius of these poems is that they insist on seeking the human despite devastating circumstances. Even the most wrung-out individual must still have a soul.” —James Tate, from his judge’s citation
The daughter of sharecroppers and raised on a small farm near the Carolinas’ border, Judy Jordan in her first poetry collection transforms the…
- 2001 Griffin Canadian winner
- 2000 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.51
Following her widely acclaimed Autobiography of Red (“A spellbinding achievement” —Susan Sontag), a new collection of poetry and prose that displays Anne Carson’s signature mixture of opposites—the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse.
In Men in the Off Hours, Carson reinvents figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon. She views the writings of Sappho, St. Augustine, and Catullus through a modern lens. She sets up startling juxtapositions (Lazarus among video paraphernalia; Virginia Woolf and Thucydides…
- 2000 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- 2000 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.5
A new collection of poetry by the director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2000. “Dark splendor” are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier’s new work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in The Ledge are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. They render the world beautifully mysterious as they slide into…
Talking Dirty to the Gods: Poems
- 2000 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.5
Yusef Komunyakaa examines the basic rituals connecting insects, animals, human beings, and gods in this inspired collection. No turn in any life cycle is taboo here; it is the author’s personal challenge that shame not dictate any facet of subject matter in this volume, a volume in which each of the seven deadly sins is enlivened, sloth first.
The first of 132 four-quatrain poems is entitled “Hearsay” and the last is called “Heresy”—the book is framed by innuendo and the kind of lively satire that extends to folklore in the blues tradition. When Komunyakaa…
- 1999 Younger Poets winner
- 2000 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.49
Ultima Thule (pronounced “thool”) is the mythical farthest point north, the coldest and remotest spot on earth. It is also the name of the most inaccessble changer in Mammoth Cave, which McCombs brings to life in his poetry. The cave’s limestone formations and the underground river that carves its spaces make a sort of echo chamber for the heartbeats of the author and his friends and neighbors, of whose lives the immense but buried cave is the dominant feature and metaphor.
