The National Book Award is awarded by the National Book Foundation. Listed here are the winners in the Poetry category. Other categories include Fiction, Nonfiction, Young People's Literature, and the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
2007
Publisher Comments
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. (read more)
2006
Publisher Comments
In a stunning new collection of poems of transport and transcendence, African-American poet Nathaniel Mackey's "asthmatic song of aspiration" scuttles across cultures and histories — from America to Andalucía, from Ethiopia to Vienna — in a sexy, beautiful adaptive dance. (read more)
2005
Review
"The publication of W. S. Merwin's selected and new poems is one of those landmark events in the literary world....Merwin is one of the great poets of our age." Los Angeles Times Book Review (read more)
2004
Review
"This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way... The known and familiar become one with the mysterious and half-wild, at the place where consciousness and the subliminal meet... In all her work, most astonishingly in this new book, Jean Valentine offers us the danger and depth of the ordinary, and we shiver with recognition and relief." Adrienne Rich
(read more)
2003
Review
"The poems in C.K. Williams' stunning new collection, The Singing, have a new density and clarity. They are clear about complex things, which one sees as slightly magnified, like pebbles on the bed of a very clear stream. Williams now realizes more than ever that 'your truths will seek you, though you still/must construct and comprehend them.' He succeeds at this task with a flair that tempers the regret that is the recurring note in these poems, and transforms it into something like joy." John Ashbery (read more)
2002
Review
"Ruth Stone's work is alternately witty, bawdy, touching, and profound....Her honesty and originality give her writing a sense of youth and newness because she looks at the world so clearly....Her writing proves to be simply inspired." USA Today (read more)
2001
Publisher Comments
Thirty-five new poems join forty years of poetry in this collected volume. Since his first published collection, a Yale Series of Younger Poets selection, Dugan's work has been honored by the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Prix de Rome, and many other distinctions. (read more)
2000
Publisher Comments
Clifton's themes meld the private with the public, as her meditations on race and history are informed by her identity as an African-American woman. A survivor of breast cancer and kidney failure, there is tragedy and hope in these poems. (read more)
1999
Publisher Comments
Collecting four early books of poems Fate, Cruelty, Killing Floor, and Sin -- and adding seventeen new dramatic monologues, this book demonstrates Ai's commitment to bearing witness to the cruelty and danger of urban life. (read more)
1998
Review
"Gerald Stern's achievement is immense.... [M]ost impressive to me is that Stern, whose work points to the self rather than a projected persona, has elevated events that do not in themselves attain high drama.... Gerald Stern invites others to assume his joys and sorrows...." The Nation (read more)
1997 Effort at Speech by William Meredith
1996 Scrambled Eggs & Whiskey by Hayden Carruth
1995 Passing Through by Stanley Kunitz
1994 A Worshipful Company of Fletchers by James Tate
1993 Garbage by A. R. Ammons
1992 New and Selected Poems by Mary Oliver
1991 What Work Is by Philip Levine
