GRIFFIN POETRY PRIZE 2005International Shortlist Book: On the Ground
Poet: Fanny Howe
Publisher: Graywolf Press Click the book cover or title to purchase On the Ground online. Read an excerpt from On the Ground. Enjoy audio and video clips of Fanny Howe reading from On the Ground. Biography  Fanny Howe is the author of over twenty books of poetry and prose including Gone: Poems (2003), Selected Poems (2000), Forged (1999), One Crossed Out (1997), O'Clock (1995), The End (1992), For Erato; The Meaning of Life (1984), Alsace-Lorraine (1982) and Poem from a Single Pallet (1980). The recipient of the 2002 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for Selected Poems (2000), she has also won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Poetry Foundation, the California Council for the Arts and the Village Voice, as well as fellowships from the Bunting Institute and the MacArthur Colony. Howe was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2001. Born in Buffalo New York in 1940, Howe is a prolific poet, novelist and essayist who has won multiple awards for her collections of poetry and novels for young adults. A creative writing teacher of note, Howe has lectured at Tufts University, Emerson College, Columbia University, Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is Professor Emerita of Writing and Literature at the University of California, San Diego. Judges’ Citation “These are startling, beautiful, challenging poems that work within the troubled and chafed borders and interfacings between spirit and material world to ask that basic question: how can we live? How can we be ordinary with each other (so necessary) in these times of war and political terror that try to keep our lives in a “state of exception” that seems to justify cruelty? Howe’s poems are firmly on the ground but not grounded; they use lyric energy and phrasings in new ways that are deft, open, and have synaptic intelligence. Here, poetic transport is not transcendent, not consolation; it is earth-bound, immediate and enamoured. This is a book that teaches us to be ecstatic about poetry; in it we hear the frayed and difficult passages of our thought and place as humans, our restive worry and our longing for peaceful cohabitation with all others. On the Ground is an essential book for our times.” 9/11 | The first person is an existentialist like trash in the groin of the sand dunes
like a brown cardboard home beside a dam like seeing like things the same
between Death Valley and the desert of Paran An earthquake a turret with arms and legs
The second person is the beloved like winners taking the hit
like looking down on Utah as if it was Saudi Arabia or Pakistan
like war-planes out of Miramar like a split cult a jolt of coke New York
like Mexico in its deep beige couplets like this, like that … like Call us all It
Thou It. “Sky to Spirit! Call us all It!” The third person is a materialist. From On the Ground, by Fanny Howe
Copyright © 2004 |
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