2008 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

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 remember
a nobody's name, that's why
they're called nobodies.
Failures are unforgettable.
— from "Failure"

"The careful, compassionate sixth outing from Schultz (Living in the Past) reverses the plot many poetry books imply. Rather than show an emotional problem (in the first poems) followed by its gradual solution, Schultz begins with warm, even heartwarming, short depictions of love, marriage, fatherhood, and mourning, in which even the elegies find reasons to love life. Schultz addresses the deceased poet David Ignatow: 'I didn't go/ to your funeral, but, late at night, I/ bathe in the beautiful ashes of your words.' As a reader moves through the volume, and especially in 'The Wandering Wingless'- the sequence whose 58 segments and 54 pages conclude the book\-Schultz's gladness gives way to regret and grim fear. Devoted (like several of Schultz's short poems) to the virtues of dogs and of dog-ownership, and to the horrors of September 11, 'Wingless' meanders through the poet's own depression and his young adult life before settling on his continuing grief for his unstable, suicidal father. 'Why/ did Dad own, believe in,/ admit to, understand/ and love nothing?' It is a question no poet could answer, though Schultz sounds brave, and invites sympathy, as he tries. The clear, even flat, free verse suggests Philip Booth, though Schultz's Jewish immigrant heritage, and his attachment to New York City, place him far from Booth's usual rural terrain. Few readers will find his language especially varied or inventive; many, however, could see their own travails in his plainly framed, consistently articulated sorrows and joys." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Life goes on for Schultz, and he continues to write about it with greater conversational sweetness than any other American poet one can readily call to mind." Booklist

Philip Schultz is the author of five collections of poetry, including the National Book Award nominee Like Wings. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, he is also the founder of the Writers Studio in New York.