Annal:2007 Griffin Poetry Prize – International
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Griffin Poetry Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Scar Tissue: Poems
- 2007 Griffin International winner
- Score: 10.57
In his new collection, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Charles Wright investigates the tenuous relationship between description and actuality—“thing is not an image”—but also reaffirms the project of attempting to describe, to capture the natural world and the beings in it, although he reminds us that landscape is not his subject matter but his technique: that language was always his subject—language and “the ghost of god.” And in the dolomites, the clouds, stars, wind, and water that populate these poems, “something un-ordinary persists.”
- 2006 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 2007 Griffin International shortlist
- 2006 NBCC–Poetry finalist
- Score: 22.56
From the winner of the PEN/Voelker Award, poems of love, terror, rage, and desire. The poems in Ooga-Booga are about a youthful slave owner and his aging slave, and both are the same man. This is the tenderest, most savage collection yet from “the most frightening American poet ever” (Calvin Bedient, Boston Review).
Salvation Blues: One Hundred Poems, 1985-2005
- 2006 Kingsley Tufts winner
- 2007 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 16.56
Rodney Jones has been called “the supreme example of the southern human person speaking in American poetry” (Southern Review). Salvation Blues traces the career of this popular narrative poet through one hundred choice poems, including twenty-four new pieces. In the tradition of William Faulkner and Sherwood Anderson, Jones conjures an America that betrays stereotyping. There is no subject that he will not touch, and in his detailed vision of his Alabama childhood, he ennobles a misunderstood community. Playing the tension between history and modernity, his poems arise where, as James Dickey put it, “the agrarian and industrial civilizations stand face to face, equally bewildered.”
- 2007 Griffin International shortlist
- Score: 6.57
Paul Farley has been widely and justly praised for his extraordinary knack of casting the contemporary experience in an almost mythic and historic light, and following the exceptional acclaim for his first two books, Farley might have been forgiven for resting on his laurels for his third. Tramp in Flames, however, finds him pushing his imaginative daring and formal ambition to the limit. A book of astonishing variety and range and no little emotional bravery, Tramp in Flames shows Farley rapidly becoming one of the most unfailingly interesting writers of any genre, and a definitive voice of the age.
