Henri Cole Wins 2012 Jackson Poetry Prize

Posted on April 6, 2012

Poets & Writers, Inc. has announced that Henri Cole is the 2012 winner of the Jackson Poetry Prize. The $50,000 prize is given annually to honor an American poet of exceptional talent who deserves wider recognition. Poets Louise Gluck, Marilyn Hacker, and James Tate were the judges. Poets were nominated by a panel of their peers who remain anonymous.

The judges' gave Cole the following citation:

Henri Cole has the voluptuary's fastidious preoccupation with sensation - rather, say, an almost Japanese vocation for connoisseurship. But what is most striking in this work is its composure. Cole's poems do not strain for attention; for all their casual, anecdotal worldliness and natural diction, they project an eerie gravity. The poems' shimmering, enigmatic tranquility coexists with intense feeling: they are clear without being stodgy, striking in their poise and delicacy and formal beauty without seeming, ever, mere exquisite diversions. He is an artist of the greatest gifts."

Henri Cole has published eight collections of poetry, including Touch (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011), and Middle Earth (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2004), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He currently teaches at Ohio State University and is poetry editor of The New Republic.