Sherry Chandler

The Books Blog

In the Guardian’s Books Blog, Jay Parini tells us Why WS Merwin deserves his second Pulitzer prize:

This week, WS Merwin won his second Pulitzer prize for poetry with The Shadow of Sirius. It’s rare for any poet to win the Pulitzer twice in a lifetime. Robert Frost won it four times, but he was Robert Frost: the major voice of American poetry for half a century. And, although he doesn’t have Frost’s “name”, WS Merwin is also a pretty significant voice. He has been a force in American poetry since WH Auden selected his first volume, A Mask for Janus, as winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1952.

And Carol Rumens explains to us why, for Great Britain’s first femail poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy’s talent is more important than her gender:

The excitement of welcoming the first woman to the post of poet laureate is similar to the emotion with which a supporter of an under-rated football team greets a goal. It’s all about that deep atavastic solidarity with your own tribe – if you’re a woman, that is. Then, of course, for both genders, there’s the moral satisfaction, and political buzz, in seeing the re-balancing of old inequalities. Women poets worth honouring have always been around, but rarely have they enjoyed full permission to be taken seriously (even if, as sometimes happened, their books sold exceptionally well). Excluded from serious education and its resultant networks and power-centres, most never came near to realising their potential. Things have improved enormously, of course. Women’s poetry has arrived.

And yet, on the most important level, gender is utterly beside the point. What matters is the quality of the work, and that the poet laureate should be the real thing � a genuine poet endowed with the power of language and the power of feeling.

Carol Ann Duffy possesses both. Her best poems have huge freshness and force. They are colloquial, energetic and contemporary but shaped with a strong sense of line and stanza. Under their sparkle they are solidly built.

They are also politically subversive. Duffy is an empathetic dramatist: from her earliest full-length collection, Standing Female Nude (Anvil Press, 1985) she has written powerful monologues that speak through those who are powerless. These characters may equally be marginalised young men as well as women.

And Adam O’Riordan asks Why are poets so fascinated with birds?:

The birds are back in woods behind my house. Wrens, nuthatches, tree-creepers; from first light their bright calls spill into my sleep. After a winter watching a monoculture of jackdaws floating over the lake like delicately made marionettes, the inhabitants of An Atlas of Breeding Birds in Cumbria have begun to spill into the peripheries of my poems.

What is that draws poets to birds? And why have so many turned to them at critical points in their own writing? The collective nouns we all remember from childhood speak of language’s innate fascination with all things avian: a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings, a parliament of fowls. And it’s no coincidence we afford them the most poetic collective nouns: right from the birth of literature birds have been present.

Spend some time over there. It’s a great blog.

Pulitzer in Poetry 2009

From The Pulitzer Prizes

For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000). Awarded to �The Shadow of Sirius,� by W. S. Merwin (Copper Canyon Press), a collection of luminous, often tender poems that focus on the profound power of memory.

The jury:

• Anne Winters, poet and professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago (chair)
• Carl Dennis*, professor and writer in residence, University of Buffalo
• James Baker Hall, professor of English emeritus, University of Kentucky and poet laureate of Kentucky 2000-2001