Two weeks before the National Book Awards are announced, Linda Gregerson is still arranging and rearranging her words of gratitude. It’s not all that typical for a poet of Gregerson’s stature and accomplishments to be, well, speechless.
She is being considered along with four other poets for the annual recognition to the finest poet in America. Reluctant to talk about what it means to win the award, Gregerson is content with simply reveling in the company of other nominees for the best poetry book of 2007. Awards will be announced Nov. 14.
“Truly, poetry is a labor of love, and just being considered is its own reward,” says Gregerson, the Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor and professor of English at LSA. “The other poets (on the list) are people whose work is an essential part of my life.”
The award has been presented since 1950. William Carlos Williams, considered one of America’s greatest poets, received the first poetry prize.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, Gregerson believes, more and more people are turning to poetry for perspective and a sense of calm. The lingering emotional and spiritual impact of the terrorist attacks are among subjects addressed in her fourth collection of poems, “Magnetic North.”
Published earlier this year by Houghton Mifflin Co., “Magnetic North” has been hailed for its intellectual acuity and probing the stark dimension of the human condition.
The collection of poems explores an emotional terrain of subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland to the latest research in cell biology to an adolescent girl’s struggle with self-mutilation to a love poem to her mother. Gregerson moves deftly, peeling away tender details of life with lyrical phrases filled with wryness and undaunted compassion.
“Gregerson self-consciously strives toward an understanding of the universal order she knows she can never have… (Her poems of the) natural world become a portal to the metaphysical,” according to a review of “Magnetic North” in Publishers Weekly.
Gregerson is a recent Guggenheim Fellow, and teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing. Her poems have appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Yale Review, Tri Quarterly and Best American Poetry 2001.
She has won numerous literary awards, including two Pushcart Prizes, Poetry’s Levinson Prison, and Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
