2008: There were 2 winners:

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Robert Hass - Publisher's Marketing: " The poems in Robert Hass's new collection--his first to appear in a decade--are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise.

His familiar landscapes are here--San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country--in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time.

The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czeslaw Milosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris-ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the "New York Times Book Review" wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every-thing else, into his poetry."

Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception."

Call number: SAC - PS3558 .A725 T56 2007

Failure: Poems by Philip Schultz - Publisher's Marketing: "A driven immigrant father, an old poet, Isaac Babel in the author's dreams--Philip Schultz gives voice to failures in poems that are direct and wry. He evokes other lives, too--family, beaches, dogs, the pleasures of marriage, New York City in the 1970s, "when nobody got up before noon, wore a suit/or joined anything"--and a mind struggling with revolutions both interior and exterior. Failure is a superb new collection from one of America's great poets. One called him a nobody.No, I said, he was a failure.You can't remembera nobody's name, that's whythey're called nobodies. Failures are unforgettable. --from "FAILURE""

Call number: SAC - PS3569 .C5533 F35 2007

2007: Native Guard by Natasha Trethewey - Publisher's Marketing: "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."

Call number: SAC - PS3570 .R433 N38 2007

2006: Late Wife by Claudia Emerson - Publisher's Marketing: "In Late Wife, a woman explores her disappearance from one life and reappearance in another as she addresses her former husband, herself, and her new husband in a series of epistolary poems. Though not satisfied in her first marriage, she laments vanishing from the life she and her husband shared for years. She then describes the unexpected joys of solitude during her recovery and emotional convalescence. Finally, in a sequence of sonnets, she speaks to her new husband, whose first wife died from lung cancer. The poems highlight how rebeginning in this relationship has come about in part because of two couples' respective losses. The most personal of Claudia Emerson's poetry collections, Late Wife is both an elegy and a celebration of a rich present informed by a complex past."

Call number: SAC - PS3551 .N4155 L38 2005

2005: Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser - Publisher's Marketing: "Ted Kooser is a master of metaphor, a poet who deftly connects disparate elements of the world and communicates with absolute precision. Critics call him a "haiku-like imagist" and his poems have been compared to Chekov's short stories. In "Delights and Shadows," Kooser draws inspiration from the overlooked details of daily life. Quotidian objects like a pegboard, creamed corn and a forgotten salesman's trophy help reveal the remarkable in what before was a merely ordinary world.

"Kooser documents the dignities, habits and small griefs of daily life, our hunger for connection, our struggle to find balance."-"Poetry"

Ted Kooser is the author of eight collections of poems and a prose memoir. He lives on a small farm in rural Nebraska."

Call number: SAC - PS3561.O6 D45 2004

2004: Walking to Martha's Vineyard by Franz Wright - Publisher's Marketing: "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. As he watches the "Resurrection of the little apple tree outside / my window," he shakes off his fear of mortality, concluding "what death . . . There is only / mine / or yours, - / but the world / will be filled with the living." In prayerlike poems he invokes the one "who spoke the world / into being" and celebrates a dazzling universe-snowflakes descending at nightfall, the intense yellow petals of the September sunflower, the planet adrift in a blizzard of stars, the simple mystery of loving other people. As Wright overcomes a natural tendency toward loneliness and isolation, he gives voice to his hope for "the only animal that commits suicide," and, to our deep pleasure, he arrives at a place of gratitude that is grounded in the earth and its moods."

Call number: SAC - PS3573 .R5327 W3 2005

2003: Moy Sand and Gravel by Paul Muldoon - Publisher's Marketing: "Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since "Hay" (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening, as gritty as they are graceful, these poems seem capable of taking in almost anything, and anybody, be it a Tuareg glimpsed on the Irish border, Bessie Smith, Marilyn Monroe, Queen Elizabeth I, a hunted hare, William Tell, William Butler Yeats, Sitting Bull, Ted Hughes, an otter, a fox, Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Joscelyne, un unearthed pit pony, a loaf of bread, an outhouse, a killdeer, Oscar Wilde, or a flock of redknots. At the heart of the book is an elegy for a miscarried child, and that elegiac tone predominates, particularly in the elegant remaking of Yeats's "A Prayer for My Daughter" with which the book concludes, where a welter of traffic signs and slogans, along with the spirits of admen, hardware storekeepers, flimflammers, fixers, and other forebears, are borne along by a hurricane-swollen canal, and private grief coincides with some of the gravest matter of our age."

Call number: SAC - PR6063 .U367 M69 2002

2002: Practical Gods by Carl Dennis - Publisher's Marketing: "Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for "wise, original, and often deeply moving" poems that "ease the reader out of accustomed modes of seeing and perceiving" (The New York Times). 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. While making no claims to put us in touch with some ultimate reality, these clear, precise, sensitive poems help us to pay homage to the everyday household gods that are easy to ignore, the gods that sustain life and make it rewarding."

Call number: SAC - PS3554 .E535 P73 2001

 2001: Different Hours by Stephen Dunn - Publisher's Marketing: "In his 11th volume of poetry, Dunn explores the "different hours" not only of a life but also of the historical and philosophical landscape beyond the personal."

Call number: SAC - PS 3554 .U49 D54 2002

2000: Repair by C.K. Williams - Publisher's Marketing: "Nominated for the National Book Award--The eighth book by one of our greatest poets
""Always, "These gigantic inconceivables.""
"Always, "What will have been done to me?""
"And so we don our mental armor, "
"flex, thrill, pay the strict attention we always knew we should."
"A violent alertness, the muscularity of risk, "
"though still the secret inward cry: What else, what more?""
--from "Risk"
"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. These forty poems experiment with form but maintain what Alan Williamson has heralded Williams for having so steadily developed from French influences: "the poetry of the sentence.""

Call number: SAC - PS3573 .I4483 R46 2000

1999: Blizzard of One by Mark Strand - Publisher's Marketing: "Strand's poems occupy a place that exists between abstraction and the sensuous particulars of experience. It is a place created by a voice that moves with unerring ease between the commonplace and the sublime. The poems are filled with "the weather of leavetaking," but they are also unexpectedly funny. The erasure of self and the depredations of time are seen as sources of sorrow, but also as grounds for celebration. This is one of the difficult truths these poems dramatize with stoicism and wit. The winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Blizzard of One is an extraordinary book--the summation of the work of a lifetime by one of our very few true masters of the art of poetry."

Call number: SAC - PS3569 .T69 B57 2000

1998: Black Zodiac by Charles Wright - Publisher's Marketing: "In an article for the Nation. James Longenbach heralded Black Zodiac as Charles Wright's "most richly satisfying single book", adding that "he has emerged as a poet whose every line seems completely recognizable and at the same time utterly fresh". 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"."

Call number: SAC - PS3573 .R52 B47 1997

1997: Alive Together: New and Selected Poems by Lisel Mueller - Publisher's Marketing: "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. It is a testament that invites readers to share her vision of experiences we all have in common: sorrow, tenderness, desire, the revelations of art, and mortality - "the hard, dry smack of death against the glass." To this community Mueller presents moments after moment where the personal and public realms intersect, where lives ranging from her own to those of Mary Shelley and Anton Webern illuminate the ways in which history shapes our lives. In "Brendel Playing Schubert, " Mueller's breathtaking linguistic virtuosity reminds us how music can transport us out of ourselves and into "the nowhere where the enchanted live"; in "Midwinter Notes, " the crepuscular world, stripped of its veil, shines forth as a signal from some realm where the sense of things may be revealed. In the title piece Mueller brings a sense of enduring and unclouded wonder to a recognition of all those whose lives might have been our own."

Call number: SAC - PS3563.U35 A79 1996

1994: Neon Vernacular: New and Selected Poems by Yusef Komunyakaa - Publisher's Marketing: "An award-winning poet's testimony of the war in Vietnam."

Call number: SAC - PS3561 .O455 N46 1993

1993: The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck - Publisher's Marketing: "The Wild Iris was written during a ten-week period in the summer of 1991. Louise Cluck's first four collections consistently returned to the natural world, to the classical and biblical narratives that arose to explain the phenomena of this world, to provide meaning and to console. Ararat, her fifth book, offered a substitution for the received: a demotic, particularized myth of contemporary family. Now 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". The poems of this sequence see beyond mortality, the bitter discovery on which individuality depends. "To be one thing/is to be next to nothing", Cluck challenges the reader. "Is it enough/only to look inward?" A major poet redefines her task--its thematic obsessions, its stylistic signature--with each volume. Visionary, shrewd, intuitive--and at once cyclical and apocalyptic--The Wild Iris is not a repudiation but a confirmation, an audacious feat of psychic ventriloquism, a fiercely original record of the spirit's obsession with, and awe of, earth."

Call number: SAC - PS3557 .L8 W5 1992

1992: Selected Poems by James Tate - Publisher's Marketing: "The Selected Poems James Tate's Pulitzer Prize-winning collection and his first British publication, gathers work from nine previous books, from the Lost Pilot which was a Yale Younger Poets selection in 1967, through his 1986 collection Reckoner. He is a most agile poet in a precarious world. Life is alarming and absurd, but properly considered that absurdity reveals, often with laughter, the something else by which we live. The poems are about our world, our wrecked, vexed love for it. Tate has been described as a surrealist. If that is what he is, his surrealism issues in a vision of a world delivered back to itself by his unillusioned subversion and candor."

Call number: SAC - PS3570.A8 A6 1991

1990: The World Doesn't End by Charles Simic - Publisher's Marketing: "In this collection, winner of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize, Charles Simic puns, pulls pranks. He can be jazzy and streetwise. Or cloak himself in antiquity. Simic has new eyes, and in these wonderful poems and poems-in-prose he lets the reader see through them."

Call number: SAC - PS3569 .I4725 W67 1989a

1987: Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove

Call number: PAL - PS3554.O884 T47 1986

1982: The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath - Publisher's Marketing: "Containing everything that celebrated poet Sylvia Plath wrote after 1956, this is one of the most comprehensive collections of her work. Edited, annotated, and with an introduction by Ted Hughes."

Call number: SAC - PS3566.L27 A17 1992

Call number: PAL - PS3566.L27 A17 1992

1979: Now and Then by Robert Penn Warren

Call number: PAL - PS3545.A78 N6 1978

1976: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror by John Ashbery - Publisher's Marketing: "John Ashberry won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for 'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror'. Ashberry reaffirms the poetic powers that have made him such an outstanding figure in contemporary literature. This new book continues his astonishing explorations of places where no one has ever been."

Call number: PAL - PS3501.S475 S4 1975

1974: The Dolphin by Robert Lowell

Call number: PAL - PS3523.O89 D6 1973

1972: Collected Poems by James Wright - Publisher's Marketing: "A collection of authentic, profound and beautiful poems."

Call number: PAL - PS3545.R58 A6 1971

1968: The Hard Hours by Anthony Hecht

Call number: PAL - PS3558.E28 H3 1967

1967: Live or Die by Anne Sexton

Call number: PAL - PS3537.E915 L7 1966

1960: Heart's Needle by W. D. Snodgrass

Call number: PAL - PS3537.N32 H4 1959

1955: Collected Poems by Wallace Stevens This definitive poetry collection, originally published in 1954 to honor Stevens on his 75th birthday, contains:
- " Harmonium"
- " Ideas of Order"
- " The Man With the Blue Guitar"
- " Parts of the World"
- " Transport Summer"
- " The Auroras of Autumn"
- " The Rock""

Call number: PAL - PS3537 .T4753 1954

1953: Collected Poems 1917-1952 by Archibald MacLeish

Call number: PAL - PS3525.A27 A17 1952

1952: Collected Poems by Marianne Moore

Call number: PAL - PS3525.O5616 A6 1951a

1951: Complete Poems by Carl Sandburg

Call number: PAL - PS3537 .A618 1950

1947: Lord Weary's Castle by Robert Lowell

Call number: PAL - PS3523.O89 L6 1961

1944: Western Star by Stephen Vincent Benet

Call number: PAL - PS3503.E5325 W4 1943

1930: Selected Poems by Conrad Aiken

Call number: PAL - PS3501.I5 A6 1961

1929: John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet - Publisher's Marketing: "One of the most widely read poems of our time--a masterful retelling of the American Civil War."

Call number: SAC - PS3503.E5325 J6 1969

Call number: PAL - PS3503.E5325 J6 1955

1928: Tristram by Edwin Arlington Robinson

Call number: PAL - PS3535.O25 T75 1927

Call number: OPC - PS3535.O25 T75 1960