The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of $25,000, awarded annually for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States by an American, is administered mutually by the Academy of American Poets and The Nation. In the past decade, winners have been Eamon Grennan (2003), Madeline DeFrees (2002), Fanny Howe (2001), David Ferry (2000), Wanda Coleman (1999), Mark Jarman (1998), Robert Pinsky (1997), Charles Wright (1996), Marilyn Hacker (1995), W.S. Merwin (1994), Thom Gunn (1993) and Adrienne Rich (1992). This year the award goes to Donald Revell for his My Mojave (Alice James). Jurors were Forrest Gander, Harryette Mullen and Brenda Hillman, who contributed the following essay. Other finalists for the award were Blue Hour, by Carolyn Forché (HarperCollins); The Blaze of the Poui, by Mark McMorris (Georgia); Otherhood, by Reginald Shepherd (Pittsburgh); and Blindsight, by Rosmarie Waldrop (New Directions).

The tasks of poetry have never been more important or more difficult than they are now. Recently I heard a well-known poet tell an audience that there aren't more readers for contemporary poetry because early-twentieth-century Modernist poets ruined it for us. That included, he said, Eliot, Stevens, Pound and Stein. I felt sorry for that poet. Poetry is an art that has always rendered mysterious matters in powerfully compressed ways (he could have told the audience) and even though readers of poetry are fewer relative to those of fiction and nonfiction, they are growing steadily in number. The number of fine independent presses--Apogee, Flood Editions, Omnidawn and Tender Buttons, to name just a few--is growing healthily as well. It is not the fault of poetry that reading the work of our finest poets takes patience; poets tell of the mind in time, and our culture privileges speedy activities. We are reminded by Shelley that poets are supposed to be radically aware of their duty as the nerves of cultures, that poetry is peculiarly equipped to bring the inner and outer worlds together, to rehabilitate modes of perception that have been undermined by an aggressively noncontemplative society. We need poetry more than ever.

Here is a poem by Donald Revell, called "To the Destroyers of Ballots":

For his cancer
My dog drinks
A wild tea
Of fallen leaves
In standing water

But this morning
We found ice
And underneath it
Nothing to drink
Only brittle leaves

No birds today
Except hawks keeping
A brown watch
Over no prey
Man and dog

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