2008

Robert Hass. Time and Materials: Poems, 1997-2005

In his first poetry collection in a decade, former poet laureate Hass is in great form, simultaneously blithe and commanding.

2008

Philip Schultz. Failure

2007

Natasha Trethewey. Native Guard

Through elegiac verse that honors her mother and tells of her own fraught childhood, Natasha Trethewey confronts the racial legacy of her native Deep South-where one of the first black regiments, the Louisiana Native Guards, was called into service during the Civil War. Trethewey's resonant and beguiling collection is a haunting conversation between personal experience and national history. ~Book jacket

2006

Claudia Emerson. Late Wife

2005

Ted Kooser. Delights & Shadows

For more than thirty years Ted Kooser has written poems that deftly bring dissimilar things into telling unities. Throughout a long and distinguished writing career he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making a poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor. A gyroscope balanced between a child's hands, a jar of buttons that recalls generations of women, and a bird briefly witnessed outside a window -- each reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world.

2004

Franz Wright. Walking to Martha's Vineyard

In this radiant new collection, Franz Wright shares his regard for life in all its forms and his belief in the promise of blessing and renewal.

2003

Paul Muldoon. Moy Sand and Gravel

2002

Carl Dennis. Practical Gods

Many of the poems in this new book involve an attempt to enter into dialogue with pagan and biblical perspectives, to throw light on ordinary experience through metaphor borrowed from religious myth and to translate religious myth into secular terms.

2001

Stephen Dunn. Different Hours

In His Eleventh volume, Stephen Dunn explores the "different hours" not only of a life but also of the historical and philosophical landscape beyond the personal.

2000

C. K. Williams. Repair: Poems

Repair is body work in C. K. Williams's sensual poems, but it is also an imaginative treatment of the consternations that interrupt life's easy narrative. National Book Critics Circle Award-winner Williams keeps the self in repair despite love, death, social disorder, and the secrets that separate and join intimates.

1999

Mark Strand. Blizzard of One

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Mark Strand writes poems that weave between abstraction and the detailed particulars of actual experience. His poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking", but they are also unexpectedly funny. Strand makes reading poetry a joy, even for those who prefer prose.

1998

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".

1997

Lisel Mueller. Alive Together: New and Selected Poems

In a collection that represents over thirty-five years of her writing life, this distinguished poet explores a wide range of subjects, which include her cultural and family history and reflect her fascination with music and the discoveries offered by language. In fact, her book is a testament to the miraculous power of language to interpret and transform our world.

1996

Jorie Graham. The Dream of the Unified Field

For this major collection, spanning twenty years of writing, Jorie Graham has made a generous selection from her five previous volumes of poetry: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts, Erosion, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness, and Materialism.

1995

Philip Levine. The Simple Truth

Philip Levine goes from strength to strength, having received the National Book Ward for Poetry for his earlier book What Work Is. Harold Bloom said, "The controlled pathos of every poem in the volume is immense, and gives me a new sense of Levine".

1994

Yusef Komunyakaa. Neon Vernacular: New & Selected Poems

1993

Louise Glück. The Wild Iris

In The Wild Iris, her most important and accomplished collection to date, ecstatic imagination supplants both empiricism and tradition, creating an impassioned polyphonic exchange among the god who "disclose(s)/virtually nothing", human beings who "leave/signs of feeling/everywhere", and a garden where "whatever/returns from oblivion returns/ to find a voice".

1992

James Tate. Selected Poems

1991

Mona Van Duyn. Near Changes

This work provides a variety of riches surpassing even that of her earlier work. For wit, inventiveness, true feeling and a sharp eye for the passing scene, there is no one better than she.

1990

Charles Simic. The World Doesn’t End

1989

Richard Wilbur. New and Collected Poems

This volume represents virtually all of Wilbur's published poetry to date, including his six earlier collections, twenty-seven new poems, and a cantata.

1988

William Meredith. Partial Accounts: New and Selected Poems

Meredith includes poems on such subjects as opera, crows, roots, battleships, ballet, and the Brooklyn Bridge.

1987

Rita Dove. Thomas and Beulah

The poems in this unusual book tell a story, forming a narrative almost like a realistic novel. Read in sequence as intended, they tell of the lives of a married black couple from the early part of the century until their deaths in the 1960s, a period that spans the great migration of blacks from rural south to urban north.

1986

Henry Taylor. The Flying Change

Taylor writes the poems of a country squire -- immersing himself in the beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains, pleasures for which a real farmer has neither the time or inclination.

1985

Carolyn Kizer. Yin

1984

Mary Oliver. American Primitive

1983

Galway Kinnell. Selected Poems

1982

Sylvia Plath. The Collected Poems

Containing everything that celebrated poet Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collections of her work.

1981

James Schuyler. The Morning of the Poem

1980

Donald Justice. Selected Poems

1979

Robert Penn Warren. Now and Then

1978

Howard Nemerov. Collected Poems

1977

James Merrill. Divine Comedies

1976

John Ashbery. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

1975

Gary Snyder. Turtle Island

1974

Robert Lowell. The Dolphin

1973

Maxine Kumin. Up Country

1972

James Wright. Collected Poems

A collection of authentic, profound and beautiful poems.

1971

W.S. Merwin. The Carrier of Ladders

1970

Richard Howard. Untitled Subjects

1969

George Oppen. Of Being Numerous

1968

Anthony Hecht. The Hard Hours

1967

Anne Sexton. Live or Die

1966

Richard Eberhart. Selected Poems

1965

John Berryman. 77 Dream Songs

1964

Louis Simpson. At the End of the Open Road

1963

William Carlos Williams. Pictures from Breughel

1962

Alan Dugan. Poems

1961

Phyllis McGinley. Times Three: Selected Verse from Three Decades

1960

W.D. Snodgrass. Heart’s Needle

1959

Stanley Kunitz. Selected Poems 1928-1958 Stanley Kunitz

1958

Robert Penn Warren. Promises: Poems 1954-1956

1957

Richard Wilbur. Things of This World

1956

Elizabeth Bishop. Poems-North & South

1955

Wallace Stevens. Collected Poems

Wallace Stevens lived long enough to see the establishment of his unquestioned position as one of the significant and enduring poets of twentieth-century America. For more than four decades he had written poetry marked by inclusive thoughtfulness, magical evocativeness of language, and an unmistakable individuality that sets him apart from his confreres. The present volume was published to honor him on his seventy-fifth birthday, October 2, 1954.

1954

Theodore Roethke. The Waking

1953

Archibald MacLeish. Collected Poems 1917-1952

This expanded volume of the distinguished poet's work contains 29 previously uncollected poems, some that had been published, and some found in manuscript after MacLeish's death in 1982. This is the definitive volume produced by a life that filled several careers as writer, teacher, and public servant, but was devoted above all to poetry.

1952

Marianne Moore. Collected Poems

1951

Carl Sandburg. Complete Poems

1950

Gwendolyn Brooks. Annie Allen

1949

Peter Viereck. Terror and Decorum

1948

W.H. Auden. The Age of Anxiety

1947

Robert Lowell. Lord Weary’s Castle

1946

No Award given.

1945

Karl Shapiro. V-Letter and Other Poems

1944

Stephen Vincent Benet. Western Star

1943

Robert Frost. A Witness Tree

1942

William Rose Benet. The Dust Which Is God

1941

Leornard Bacon. Sunderland Capture

1940

Mark Van Doren. Collected Poems

1939

John Gould Fletcher. Selected Poems

1938

Marya Zaturenska. Cold Morning Sky

1937

Robert Frost. A Further Range

1936

Robert P. Tristram Coffin. Strange Holiness

1935

Audrey Wurdemann. Bright Ambush

1934

Robert Hillyer. Collected Verse

1933

Archibald MacLeish. Conquistador

1932

George Dillon. The Flowering Stone

1931

Robert Frost. Collected Poems

1930

Conrad Aiken. Selected Poems

1929

Stephen Vincent Benet. John Brown’s Body

One of the most widely read poems of our time--a masterful retelling of the American Civil War.

1928

Edwin Arlington Robinson. Tristram

1927

Leonora Speyer. Fiddler’s Farewell

1926

Amy Lowell. What’s O’Clock

1925

Edwin Arlington Robinson. The Man Who Died Twice

1924

Robert Frost. New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes

1923

Edna St. Vincent Millay. The Ballad of the Harp-Weaver, A Few Figs from Thistles, Eight Sonnets in American Poetry, 1922, A Miscellany

1922

Edwin Arlington Robinson. Collected Poems

1921

No award given

1920

No award given

1919

Carl Sandburg. Corn Huskers

1919

Margaret Widdemer. Old Road to Paradise

1918

Sara Teasdale. Love Songs