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Emerson

Claudia Emerson, pictured here, has just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 2006, for her collection Late Wife, published by Dave Smith's imprint.

Smith is, himself, a leading poet - and, indeed, one of the central figures in the (poetry) regionalism debates of the last decade of the last century - a defender of voices from the South.

Those who notice such things - and there are many - will observe that Emerson writes a formal, conservative, even traditional lyric.

If one checks to see who the jurors were, one sees that the names Ted Kooser, Mary Karr and Michael Harper appear. Kooser, apparently contra much that is avante-garde or political in poetry, has written about the need for "lucid", reader-friendly poems.

I haven't read the collection but will try to locate the book here in England in order to do so.

For those interested in finding out more, here's the link to the collection's publisher, the BBC and finally the Pulitzer site with the list of jurors:


http://www.lsu.edu/lsupress/Books/Fall2005/books/Emerson_Late.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4917338.stm

http://pulitzer.org/

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