Annal:2008 Griffin Poetry Prize – International

Notes from the Air: Selected Later Poems

John Ashbery

• 2008 Griffin International winner
• Score: 10.58

While Ashbery has long been considered a powerful force in twentieth-century culture, Notes from the Air demonstrates clearly how important and relevant his writing continues to be, well into the twenty-first century. Many of the books from which these poems are drawn are regularly taught in university classrooms across the country, and critics and scholars vigorously debate his newest works as well as his classics. He has already published four major books since the turn of the new millennium, and, although 2007 marks his eightieth birthday, this legendary literary figure continues to write fresh, new, and vibrant poetry that remains as stimulating, provocative, and controversial as ever.

Notes from the Air reveals, for the first time in one volume, the remarkable evolution of Ashbery’s poetry from the mid-1980s into the new century, and offers an irresistible sampling of some of the finest work by this “national treasure.”

The Complete Poetry: A Bilingual Edition

César Vallejo, Clayton Eshleman

• 2008 Griffin International shortlist
• Score: 6.58

This first translation of the complete poetry of Peruvian César Vallejo (1892-1938) makes available to English speakers one of the greatest achievements of twentieth-century world poetry. Handsomely presented in facing-page Spanish and English, this volume, translated by National Book Award winner Clayton Eshleman, includes the groundbreaking collections The Black Heralds (1918), Trilce (1922), Human Poems (1939), and Spain, Take This Cup from Me (1939).

Vallejo’s poetry takes the Spanish language to an unprecedented level of emotional rawness and stretches its grammatical possibilities. Striking against theology with the very rhetoric of the Christian faith, Vallejo’s is a tragic vision—perhaps the only one in the canon of Spanish-language literature—in which salvation and sin are one and the same. This edition includes notes on the translation and a fascinating translation memoir that traces Eshleman’s long relationship with Vallejo’s poetry. An introduction and chronology provide further insights into Vallejo’s life and work.

Ripple Effect: New and Selected Poems

Elaine Equi

• 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.

Selected Poems: 1969-2005

David Harsent

• 2008 Griffin International shortlist
• Score: 6.58

In an illustrious career, David Harsent has published eight collections of poetry, from A Violent County in 1969 to Legion, winner of the Forward Prize in 2005. This selection, made by the author himself, draws upon the full arc of his verse and offers an outstanding concentration of, and introduction to, the full range and powers of this distinguished poet.