The National Book Critics Circle chose these five books of poetry as the best published in 2006. The award winner will be announced on March 8, 2007 at the New School in New York City -- here are links for poetry lovers who want to read all five and choose their own favorite.
(University of Pittsburgh Press, 2006) Daisy Fried began her literary career as a freelance journalist and staff writer for the Philadelphia Weekly, but she now devotes her full time to teaching and writing poetry. Her first book, She Didn’t Mean to Do It, won the Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2000. Her publisher describes this collection as “subversive, frequently self-mocking narrative poems... by turns funny and serious, book-smart and street-smart, lyrical and colloquial... unsentimental but full of emotion...”
(BOA Editions, Ltd., 2006) W.D. Snodgrass was the first of his generation to be labelled a confessional poet, on publication of his first book, Heart’s Needle (1959), which won the Pulitzer Prize. His 20-plus books since then have been lauded and loved for their use of various poetic techniques, forms and voices to deal with untraditional poetic subjects like divorce, child custody, a cycle of poems written in the voices of Joseph Goebbels, Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler and other members of Hitler’s inner circle, and more recently, war in Iraq, credit card theft and hip replacements.
(MARGIE/Intuit House, 2006) Troy Jollimore is a philosophy professor at California State University, Chico, working this year as a Stanford Humanities Center Fellow on a project called “The Nature of Loyalty.” Billy Collins wrote in the preface to this, his first collection, that “Tom Thomson in Purgatory falls gracefully into the American tradition of the extended persona poem... Troy Jollimore knows how to trot forth a character as distinct as one who might be encountered in sharply rendered fiction....”
(bilingual edition, Greek with English translation by Karen Emmerich, Archipelago Books, 2006) Miltos Sachtouris studied law but did not practice it, devoting himself instead to writing numerous volumes of poetry, selected here, in reaction to the horrors and civil upheavals of Greece in the 20th century. His publisher says, “Sachtouris’ world is one of primary colors, blindingly bright and slightly surreal; images—of broken glass, of howling dogs, of bloody gauze and people who fly—recur like totems throughout his work, binding the poems together into a tight unity.”
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2006) Readers either love or hate Seidel’s work—it’s simultaneously scary, funny & brilliant, like the title of this new book. In New York Magazine Alex Halberstadt defines his concerns: “politics, sex, and mortality—as well as the picturesque and expensive ways of staving it off.” In the New York Sun Adam Kirsch defines his poetic tools: “mystification and outrage.” And in 2001 in the Boston Review Calvin Bedient announced his new book with this warning: “Hide your lyricals, your tenders: Frederick Seidel is coming... grim beyond Gothic contrivance, the most frightening American poet ever.”
Bob Holman gave you his choices of the best poetry books he read in 2006 back in December. Now the National Book Critics Circle has selected their nominees for the best poetry books published in 2006. And we’d still like to hear about your favorites -- tell us please!
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