Eryn Green, a doctoral candidate at the University of Denver, has joined Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W.S. Merwin and Jack Gilbert on the illustrious list of winners of the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize, the nation’s oldest annual literary award.
The prize, established in 1919, is given for an unpublished manuscript by an American citizen under 40 who has not yet published a full book of poems. The winning collection is then published by Yale University Press.
Mr. Green’s entry, “Eruv,†was selected by Caryl Phillips, the contest’s judge, who called it a reminder of “how essential wilderness is to poetry â€" a wilderness in terms of how frm and language both reinvent and get reinvented.â€
It’s a point perhaps illustrated more directly by “Page of Swords,†a short poem from the collection:
So take care of yourself, learn how
to take better pictures, breathe
into your hips, braver please
give love credit for
the way I live
that call me
kind of feeling
frenzied, lupine,
the card I draw
blushing in your breast
pocket undressing
freedom I know you
know you understand
From “Eruv,†by Eryn Green, to be published by Yale University Press in April 2014
