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2000 LENORE MARSHALL POETRY PRIZE |
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WELLESLEY, Mass. -- David Ferry, Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus at Wellesley College, has been awarded the 2000 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for his book Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations (The University of Chicago Press). The $10,000 award is given annually by the Academy of American Poets and The Nation magazine for the most outstanding book of poetry published in the United States in the previous year. Ferry's book was chosen from more than 180 submissions. Jury chair Mary Kinzie wrote of the book, in part, "[it] is brilliant with the certainty that comes with contemplation. David Ferry's poems are defined as remarkably by the virtues of theme as by those of style. Plainness grows eloquent as it moves across the subjects of true feeling, from an un-self-pitying awareness that is perhaps more Greek than Roman to a generosity of mind that works in parallel with that awareness." Born in Orange, New Jersey, in 1924, David Ferry attended Amherst College and Harvard University, and served as a Sergeant in the United States Army Air Force from 1943 to 1946. A professor at Wellesley from 1952-89, Ferry recently appeared with former US poet laureate and Boston University Professor Robert Pinsky, at a poetry reading as part of Wellesley's 125th anniversary observances. Ferry is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His previous books of poetry and translation include The Eclogues of Virgil (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), The Odes of Horace: A Translation (1998), Dwelling Places: Poems and Translations (1993), Gilgamesh: A New Rendering in English Verse (1992), Strangers: A Book of Poems (1983), On the Way to the Island (1960), and The Limits of Mortality: An Essay on Wordsworth's Major Poems (1959). His Epistles of Horace: A Translation is forthcoming in 2001 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Of No Country I Know: New and Selected Poems and Translations won the Bingham Poetry Prize from Boston Book Review and was a finalist for The New Yorker Book Award and the L.L.Winship/ PEN New England Award. Ferry's other awards include the Sixtieth Fellowship of The Academy of American Poets, the Teasdale Prize for Poetry, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, the Ingram Merrill Award and the William Arrowsmith Translation Prize from AGNI magazine. In 1998, he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Ferry will be a visiting lecturer in creative writing at Boston University in the spring of 2001. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize was first awarded in 1975 and has been given annually ever since. The previous winners of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize include John Ashbery, Sterling A. Brown, Hayden Carruth, Wanda Coleman, Cid Corman, Thom Gunn, Marilyn Hacker, John Haines, Donald Hall,Josephine Jacobsen, Mark Jarman, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Philip Levine, John Logan, Thomas McGrath, W. S. Merwin, Josephine Miles, Howard Moss, Robert Pinsky, Adrienne Rich, Michael Ryan, George Starbuck, Allen Tate, and Charles Wright. The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize is endowed by a gift to the Academy from the New Hope Foundation, which for more than forty years worked to support literature, the arts, and world peace. |
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Last Modified: October 13, 2000
