Annal:2007 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
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.”
