Annal:2003 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 2003. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- 2003 NBCC–Poetry winner
- Score: 10.53
In her long-awaited fourth book of poetry, Susan Stewart gives us a series of splendid, numinous poems about truths learned with the mind but set free through the senses. Modeled on the seventeenth-century practice of century forms, or books of one hundred pages, Columbarium expresses the bond between the living and the dead in voices of parent to child, lover to beloved, and mortal to the gods. The book arrives as a meditative gift from one of our most respected poet-critics.
Stewart frames her Columbarium with four poems paying homage to the…
Blue Hour: Poems
- 2003 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.53
“Blue Hour is an elusive book, because it is ever in pursuit of what the German poet Novalis called ‘the [lost] presence beyond appearance.’ The longest poem, ‘On Earth,’ is a transcription of mind passing from life into death, in the form of an abecedary, modeled on ancient gnostic hymns. Other poems in the book, especially ‘Nocturne’ and ‘Blue Hour,’ are lyric recoveries of the act of remembering, though the objects of memory seem to us vivid and irretrievable, the rage to summon and cling at once fierce and distracted.…
Vénus Khoury-Ghata, Marilyn Hacker
- 2003 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.53
Translated by celebrated American poet Marilyn Hacker, Vénus Khoury-Ghata’s She Says explores the mythic and confessional attractions and repulsions of the French and Arabic imaginations with poems that open like “a suitcase filled with alphabets.” Sex, barrenness, grief, and death—the backdrop of a war-ravaged country—are always at the edges, made increasingly urgent by lines often jagged and spare, their music unhaltered. Khoury-Ghata is a vital voice in both her native and adopted languages and we are pleased to present this important collection in English.
What Narcissism Means to Me: Poems
- 2003 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.53
In What Narcissism Means to Me, award-winning poet Tony Hoagland levels his particular brand of acute irony not only on the personal life, but also on some provinces of American culture. In playful narratives, lyrical outbursts, and overheard conversations, Hoagland cruises the milieu, exploring the spiritual vacancies of American satisfaction. With humor, rich tonal complexity, and aggressive moral intelligence, these poems bring pity to our folly and celebrate our resilience.
- 2003 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.53
Using natural, biblical, and classical imagery, these poems explore the difficulties of faith and love—particularly the difficulties of their expression, their performance. Moving between dramatic and interior monologue, and moving through intersecting histories, the ambiguities of inwardness and the eros of wakeful existence, these poems search for relationships with self, others, the world and God that are authentic—however quirky or strange.
In Tennessee I Found a Firefly
Flashing in the grass; the mouth of a spider clung
to the dark of it:…
