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For a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000).

Delights & Shadows, by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)

Lee Bollinger and Ted Kooser

Columbia University President Lee C. Bollinger (left) presents Ted Kooser with the 2005 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.

Winning Work

Delights & Shadows

For more than thirty years, Ted Kooser has written poems that deftly bring dissimilar things into telling unities. Throughout a long and distinguished writing career he has worked toward clarity and accessibility, making a poetry as fresh and spontaneous as a good watercolor. A gyroscope balanced between a child's hands, a jar of buttons that recalls generations of women, and a bird briefly witnessed outside a window -- each reveals the remarkable within an otherwise ordinary world.

(From the book jacket)

 

Biography

Ted Kooser is the current Poet Laureate of the United States.

He is the author of eight full-length collections of poetry, nine chapbooks and special editions, and Braided Creek, a collaboration with Jim Harrison. A retired life insurance executive, he lives on acreage near the village of Garland, Nebraska.

 

 

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Poetry in 2005:

The Jury

Linda Gregerson(chair )

Frederick G.L. Huetwell Professor of English

James Baker Hall

professor of English emeritus and poet laureate of Kentucky

Wesley McNair

poet

Winners in Poetry

2005 Prize Winners

Staff

For its comprehensive, clear-headed coverage of the resignation of New Jersey's governor after he announced he was gay and confessed to adultery with a male lover.