2006

Troy Jollimore. Tom Thomson in Purgatory

2005

Jack Gilbert. Refusing Heaven

In Refusing Heaven, Jack Gilbert writes about the commingled passion, loneliness, and sometimes surprising happiness of a life spent in luminous understanding of his own blessings and shortcomings.

2004

Adrienne Richl. The School Among the Ruins

2003

Susan Stewart. Columbarium

2002

B.H. Fairchild. Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest

2001

Albert Goldbarth. Saving Lives: Poems

2000

Judy Jordan. Carolina Ghost Woods

1999

Ruth Stone. Ordinary Words

1998

Marie Ponsot. The Bird Catcher

1997

Charles Wright. Black Zodiac

These are poems suffused with spiritual longing, lyrical meditations on faith, religion, heritage, and morality that also explore aging and mortality with restless grace. Entering by way of small moments, Wright magnifies details to reveal a truth much larger than the quotidian happening that engendered it. The result is an astonisning, flexible poetry that, as Helen Vendler has observed, makes Wright a poet who "sounds like nobody else".

1996

Robert Hass. Sun Under Wood

1995

William Matthews. Time and Money

A collection by a worldly and cynical writer addresses his lifetime losses and loves, offering his observations on such topics as musicians and money.

1994

Mark Rudman. Rider

Rudman skillfully explores his own life and past.

1993

Mark Doty. My Alexandria

A versatile, technically astute poet, Doty masterfully tackles themes of death, beauty and discovery in this collection.

1992

Hayden Carruth. Collected Shorter Poems

Collected Shorter Poems, 1946-1991 presents all the lyric, short narrative, comic, meditative, nature, and erotic poetry the poet has chosen from the past forty-five years, including a section of new poems not found in his previous twenty-two books.

1991

Albert Goldbarth. Heaven and Earth

1990

Amy Gerstler. Bitter Angel

1989

Rodney Jones. Transparent Jestures

1988

Donald Hall. The One Day

Hall celebrates his sixtieth birthday with the most powerful poem he has ever written, a book-length work that evokes the kind of public power associated with Hall's teacher Archibald MacLeish.

1987

C.K. Williams. Flesh and Blood

In this collection, consisting of 130 8-line stanzas, these long, breathy lines make his poems lean toward a prosy, conversational voice.

1986

Edward Hirsch. Wild Gratitude

From its opening epigraph, On Love takes the subjects of and fusion, autonomy and blur. The initial up separateness progression of fifteen shapely and passionate lyrics (including a sonnet about the poet at seven, a villanelle about the loneliness of a pioneer woman on the prairie, and an elegy for Amy Clampitt) opens out into a sequence of meditations about love.

1985

Louise Gluck. The Triumph of Achilles

Gluck shows the reader what she wants us to see through her poetry.

1984

Sharon Olds. The Dead and the Living

Olds explores the world of familial relationships.

1983

James Merrill. The Changing Light at Sandover

1982

Katha Pollitt. Antarctic Traveler

1981

A.R. Ammons. A Coast of Trees