Annal:2003 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Moy Sand and Gravel: Poems
- 2003 Griffin International winner
- 2003 Pulitzer–Poetry winner
- Score: 20.53
Paul Muldoon’s ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting…
American Sonnets: Poems
- 2003 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Fifty-nine “Stern sonnets” of twenty or so lines from the 1998 National Book Award winner. This stunning collection moves from autobiography to the visionary in surges of memory and language that draw the reader from one poem to the next. “I was taken over by the writing of these poems,” Stern says.
Mr. and Mrs. Scotland Are Dead: Poems 1980-1994
- 2003 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Scottish writer Kathleen Jamie is one of Britain’s leading poets. Her work is intelligent and subtle, her language inventive and refreshing. This selection reveals the generous range of her concerns, from life in the wilder parts of Pakistan and Tibet to the “difficult questions” of identity posed in her celebrated collection, The Queen of Sheba.
Steal Away: Selected and New Poems
- 2003 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.53
Steal Away presents C.D. Wright’s best lyrics, narratives, prose poems, and odes with new “retablos” and a bracing vigil on incarceration. Long admired as a fearless poet writing authentically erotic verse, Wright—with her Southern accent and cinematic eye—couples strangeness with uncanny accuracy to create poems that “offer a once-and-for-all thing, opaque and revelatory, ceaselessly burning.”
You didn’t know my weariness, error, incapacity,
I was the poet
of shadow work and towns with quarter-inch
phone books, of failed…
