Annal:2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in the year 2007. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
Old Heart: Poems
- 2007 LATimes–Poetry winner
- 2007 NBA–Poetry finalist
- Score: 16.57
In his new collection, Stanley Plumly confronts and celebrates mortality—in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters. Archetypal, sometimes even allegorical, the poems in Old Heart amount to a sustained meditation. The American Academy of Arts and Letters declared of Plumly that “he has in the last thirty years quietly, steadily, expanded the range of lyric poetry in English…[and] reinvigorated our poetry.” His ethical rigor and literary modesty combine in Old Heart—his finest book of poetry.
The Kitchen Sink: New and Selected Poems, 1972-2007
- 2007 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.57
Albert Goldbarth has created an unmistakable signature style—learned, copious, hilarious, and heartbreaking—which has so far spanned an award-winning career of thirty-five years. The Kitchen Sink brings together forty new poems with a rich selection of earlier poetry, ranging from the brief, flickering lyric to the long, narrative sequence. In both forms, Goldbarth exerts a wild showmanship and an ever-widening scope to illustrate the complex character and interconnectedness of humanity, history, and art. The Kitchen Sink is the definitive book by one of America’s most original and entertaining poets.
- 2007 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.57
Following her National Book Award-winning Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965-2003, Jean Valentine returns with a meditative and magical new collection.
In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet’s extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine’s quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.
- 2007 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 6.57
In a recent interview Marvin Bell said, “I’ve been trying for thirty years to figure out how best to put the news into poems-what other people would call politics. But there are some hairy aesthetic questions connected to overtly political poems.”
Mars Being Red is the most political book of Bell’s storied career-and one of his most beautiful. Infuriated by our country’s military aggression and destructive politics, Bell asks, What shall we do, we who are at war but are asked / to pretend we are not? What Bell has done is craft a book of urgency and insight, anger and action:
Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems
- 2008 Griffin International shortlist
- 2007 LATimes–Poetry finalist
- Score: 12.58
“Elaine Equi’s narrow lines are like the rungs of a ladder that one ascends while one is descending them. It’s a motion like that in Wang Wei’s lines, Stars / float up / toward dawn,‘ which she quotes in her cento, Wang Wei’s Moon.’ Or, as she beautifully puts it, Discreetly a breeze enters the room.’”-John Ashbery
Ripple Effect showcases thirty years of Elaine Equi’s investigations into our cultural obsessions. Vivid, savvy, and accessible, her poems can transform almost anything-a list, a diary entry, advertising speak-into sophisticated, germane elixirs of pop culture and high art. Widely published, these poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Poetry Review, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry.
