The prestigious and highly anticipated annual anthology of the best poetry in English from the shortlist of the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize. Each year, the best books of poetry published in English are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001, this annual prize has tremendously spurred interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English and works in translation. Annually, The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

Introduces a distinctive voice in Eastern European poetry.

“You don’t live if there’s no poetry: you don’t live at all, or if you appear to yourself to be living, you’re not. You really are living, though, even if you’re dead, because you do have poetry, poetry’s with you whether or not you know it...” Great Silent Ballad, beloved lyric poet A.F. Moritz’s twenty-second volume of poetry, in visionary terms forwards the assertion that poetry, a primordial reality, is in the current moment both the equal of, and the antidote to, the rest of present-day civilization and its suicidal nature. The book unfolds in seven short sections that probe such topics as the crucial value of childhood; a human person’s development through maturity and age; the perennially avant-garde nature of great poetry no matter what time and place; and poetry’s inherent involvement with hope and creativity, life and feeling, freedom and love. Great Silent Ballad also reprises Moritz’s longstanding celebration of common human conversation, the apex of which (he argues convincingly) is what we call “poetry”—meaning not just the art of verse, but our total access to the goodness of natural existence.

Winner of the Costa Poetry Award • Shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Award and the Forward Prize “These lyrics…illustrate poetry’s unique ability to shock readers into a renewed awareness of the world.” —Washington Post Falling Awake, winner of the Costa Award for Poetry, “give[s] us the sensation of living alongside the natural world, of being a spectator to the changes that mark our mortality” (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker). Falling Awake expands on the imagery of fallen soldiers from Homer’s Iliad portrayed in her previous volume, Memorial—defining life as a slowly falling weight, where beings fight against their inevitable end. Oswald reimagines classical figures such as Orpheus and Tithonus alive in an English landscape together with shadows, flies, villagers, dew, crickets—all characterized in tension between the weight of death and their own willpower. FROM “VERTIGO” let me shuffle forward and tell you the two minute life of rain starting right now lips open and lidless cold all-seeing gaze

Library of Congress copy signed by the author.

An urgent new collection from the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and “one of the undisputed master poets of our time” (Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR) Words, voices reek of the worlds from which they emerge: different worlds, each with its all but palpable aroma, its parameters, limitations, promise. Words—there is a gap, nonetheless always and forever, between words and the world— slip, slide, are imprecise, BLIND, perish. • Set up a situation,— . . . then reveal an abyss. For more than fifty years, Frank Bidart has given voice to the inner self, to the depths of his own psyche and the unforgettable characters that populate his poems. In Against Silence, the Pulitzer Prize winner’s eleventh collection of poetry, Bidart writes of the cycles we cannot escape and the feelings we cannot forget. Our history is not a tabula rasa but a repeating, refining story of love and hate, of words spoken and old cruelties enacted. Moving among the dead and the living, the figures of his life and of his past, Bidart calls reality forth—with nothing settled and nothing forgotten, we must speak.

In June 2001, the inaugural Griffin Poetry Prize for the best book of poetry published in English in 2000 was awarded to two poets: one Canadian and one international. The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology includes selections from the remarkable shortlisted books chosen by jurors Carolyn Forche, Dennis Lee, and Paul Muldoon. The selections from the international shortlist include poems from the translation by Chana Bloch and Chana Kronfeld of Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open; Fanny Howe's Selected Poems; Les Murray's Learning Human: Selected Poems; and the translation by Nikolai Popov and Heather McHugh of Glottal Stop: 101 Poems by Paul Celan. The selections from the Canadian shortlist include poems from the translation by Robert Bringhurst of Ghandl of the Qayahl Llaanas' Nine Visits to the Mythworld; Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours; and Don McKay's Another Gravity.

In The Hundred Lives Russell Thornton illuminates the intricate imaginative orders of love at work within an individual life.

"Norman Dubie is one of our premier poets."—The New York Times "Dubie's poems are unmatched in their incandescent imaginings, gorgeous language, and fearless tracking of the inexorably turning wheel of existence."—Booklist "Dubie [is] one of the most powerful and influential American poets."—The Washington Post In his twenty-ninth collection of poems, Norman Dubie returns to a rich, color-soaked vision of the world. Strangeness becomes a parable for compassion, each poem leading the reader to an uncommon way of understanding human capacities. In the futuristic sphere of The Quotation of Bone, the mind wanders meditatively into an imaginative and uncontainable history. The Quotations of Bone The meal of bone was a soured milk— just the heads of giant elk in a dark circle looking down on a wooden bowl of soda crackers and pork. One large knife resting in the meat of a woodsman's calloused hand. He grins at his woman who is slowly poisoning him with the stringy resins of morning glory. A tasteless turpentine with pink pig. The speeches of bone are matrimonial in early autumn— by January there's a froth of blood at a nostril. He thinks a long icicle is buried in his ear. She thinks D. H. Lawrence was a grim buccaneer. I hate most men. Adore the few named Lou. One small addendum: the dead elk are grinning too. Norman Dubie is a Regents professor at Arizona State University. He lives in Tempe, Arizona.

Clyde Barrow's last daydream suggests a different finale; a reanimated Nietzsche contemplates Hitler's checked trousers; a dream about fast food reveals the secret life of a supermodel; Christopher Columbus plays the ship's lounge with singing radio. In this surreal, whimsical, and darkly ironic first collection, Connolly agilely navigates the more devious turns of the contemporary psyche.