by Derek Graf
July 23, 2024




Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2024; 109 pages; $19.99.




The poems in Griffin’s prize anthology walk on a plateau of years and roads that span the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well as the face of this vexed globe we call home. Jorie Graham’s poem “The the Rain” included in the Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2024: A Selection of the Short List, observes that although “we are // alive in the death / of this iteration of / earth,” this “death” is not necessarily terminal, for “there will be another / in which no creatures like us // walk on this / plateau of years & minutes & grasses & / roads.” It would be difficult to find more distinct poets than the group gathered here; and yet, what unites these writers is their fixation on observing historical and alternative worlds through a grounded perspective in the present. Even bracketing this framework, what will strike readers is the sustained attention to craft and language that defines this impressive collection of contemporary poetry. 

The anthology opens with selections from Halyna Kruk’s A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails, translated from the Ukrainian by Amelia M. Glaser and Yuliya Ilchuck. In the first poem, “there and back again,” the speaker remarks that “war doesn’t suit the rest of the world / like mutilation with an evening gown.” Writing in the context of the war in Ukraine, Kruk’s poems evidence a tension between tenderness and destruction while also balancing a gaze that looks both to the past and future of the individual and the nation. After describing how “beautiful young ladies dive into the canal’s waters / sunlit, full of love, life, laughter / perfect, audacious, like / German pre-war postcards,” the speaker pulls back from this idyllic moment and, “in the face of death,” pleads with an unnamed beloved to “love me as if there will never be / enough light to find each other again.” Because perhaps there won’t be. Kruk doesn’t rely on platitudes or images of false hope in her work; rather, she hands the reader each poem like a “mangled blossom / guilty of nothing.” But not entirely innocent, either. 

Kruk’s poems are followed by a selection of poems from Jorie Graham’s collection To 2040, which projects the poet’s vision over 15 years into the future while also, as judge Alfred F. Moritz remarks, focusing “on a present already on the brink of perdition.” In Graham’s poems, even the slightest distance from the familiar can make an image entirely strange, and the speaker of these poems is often aware of this sense of estrangement: “Is this a real / encounter I ask. Of the old / kind. When there were // ravens. No / says the light. You / are barely here. The / raven left a // long time ago.” Graham’s poems move at a pace that invites the reader to rush headlong through the brief lines and enjambed stanzas, but this formal structure also demands re-reading (as all great poems do) for a full immersion into content as well as cadence. Moreover, these poems reinforce the notion that language has its limits, for even the poet must admit that “each word I use I have used before.” However, by taking language out of its transactional context of direct communication and placing it in formal constructions that are evocative in their complexity, Graham instructs us that “much remains because much remains hidden.”


Reading these openings selections from the short list, we see the present as history in Kruk’s poems followed by the future as poetic projection in Graham. The selections from Ishion Hutchinson’s School of Instructions focus instead on the violence of the early twentieth century. In these poems, the key figure is a character named Godspeed who witnesses the global brutality of WWI. The sample of Hutchinson’s poems provided in the Griffin Anthology includes selections from the poem “His Idylls at Happy Grove.” In the second of these selections, the speaker observes how soldiers “shovelled the long trenches day and night,” then provides a stanza-length catalog of mud, opening with the following images: “Frostbitten mud. Shellshock mud. Dungheap mud. Imperial mud.” Though these poems provide a remarkable range of style, of all the poems in the anthology these pieces provide some of the most eloquent examples of the traditional lyric. For example, the opening selection from “Three Heroic Emblems,” begins with these lines: “Where the sun never conceded to light, / now lit. Even still, belated justice / does not reflect where it must show: England: // leave room for the beloved below; / recover them all, for belated praise.” The alliterative “b” that guides the reader through these introductory lines is but a small example of the astute attention to linguistic craft on display in these rich and complex pieces.

For those readers familiar with Ann Lauterbach’s work, it should come as no surprise that the selections from her collection Door situate the titular object in both literal and metaphorical arenas of observation and contemplation. As the speaker remarks in the poem “Habitat,” “Sometimes choices are words; sometimes they / come as tactile objects to be touched.” What is ineffable, and what is tactile? Lauterbach’s poems teach us that everything (and everyone) is both: “Now at last it is raining. / These weathers are included as a reminder / that our inner and outer / beings are breathing into the seams of the day / and that the temporal scansion / is as uninhabitable as a rainbow.” Our physical and spiritual selves are in constant interaction with the time and place we inhabit, and the elusive nature of the poem is as beautiful as it is mysterious. Words are fugitive: “they need not attach themselves to that this or this that.” While we fumble and grasp after them anyway, Lauterbach’s lyrics function as a source of refuge for language to take its myriad forms—it is precisely the absence of static meaning that gives these poems their undeniable energy. 

In the final selection of poems shortlisted for the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize, Homero Aridjis invites readers into his personal and familial history while always staying within range of the larger historical, economic, and political forces that influence the behavior of individuals. In the first poem anthologized here from his collection Self-Portrait in the Zone of Silence, the speaker recounts the steps he must make to meet his dead father in an orchard: “Past noon. Past the cinema / with the tall sorrowful walls / on the point of coming down, I enter the orchard.” It is telling not only that the cinema is nearly defunct, but also that the speaker includes this detail before introducing himself. Thus, although these poems often figure the self, they do not foreground the individual at the expense of other considerations. The speaker of this poem is just one person among “day laborers, dogs, and doors.” In this poem’s central meeting between deceased father and living son, the encounter concludes on notes of both reconciliation and acceptance of the unbridgeable distance that divides the living and the dead. 

For this reader, the irony of the poem lies in the question as to whether the interaction would have gone any differently had the speaker’s father still been among the living, but it is precisely this sort of complexity that proves Aridjis’ place among the other remarkable poets shortlisted in this anthology. Aridji’s selection is one of personal detail and local observation that speaks to the staying power of the visceral image as a vehicle of meaning, and that allows this anthology to keep the reader grounded even in historical, geographical, or metaphorical contexts that are beyond one’s immediate, lived experience. 

Anyone who wishes to keep track of the pulse of contemporary world poetry would be hard-pressed to find a more succinct sample of the most promising trends the medium has to offer. 

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“This Iteration of Earth:” Selections from the 2024 Griffin Poetry Prize Short List
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Image by Peggy Sue Zinn from Unsplash
Derek Graf is the author of Green Burial, winner of the 2021 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award for a First or Second Book of Poetry. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sugar House Review, The Journal, and Sixth Finch. He lives in New York City. 
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