Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass was named a National Book Award finalist Thursday for his collection “Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005.”

The book, more than 10 years in the making, came out on Tuesday.

Hass’s poetry is steeped with the beauty and details of the natural world. He speaks of our impact on planet Earth: “the earth needs a dream of restoration in which/ She dances and the birds just keep arriving.” He slams the Iraq invasion, adds a light, graceful touch of memory, then a disturbing one, by turns. The New York Times Book Review wrote, “It has always been Mr. Hass’s aim to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every­thing else, into his poetry.”

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Other National Book Award finalist poets this year:
Linda Gregerson, “Magnetic North”
David Kirby, “The House on Boulevard St.”
Stanley Plumly, “Old Heart”
Ellen Bryant Voigt, “Messenger”

For more information, click here for the National Book Award Foundation: Celebrating the best of American Literature and here for Hass’s Academy of American Poets page.

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The AP roundup about the awards:
Christopher Hitchens, Sherman Alexie among National Book Award finalists
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Should Christopher Hitchens win a National Book Award, you can be sure he won’t thank any higher powers.
The author, columnist and commentator was nominated for “God Is Not Great,” a polemic with a self-evident theme. Hitchens’ book received mixed reviews, but became a best seller over the spring and summer and continued a wave of anti-religious works, including Richard Dawkins’ “The God Delusion” and Daniel Dennett’s “Breaking the Spell.”
Other nominees announced Wednesday include Sherman Alexie, cited in the young people’s literature category for “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”; debut novelists Joshua Ferris and Mischa Berlinski; and scholar Arnold Rampersad, for “Ralph Ellison: A Biography.”
Among those not nominated: Junot Diaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”; Michael Chabon’s “The Yiddish Policemen’s Union”; and Richard Russo’s “Bridge of Sighs.” Also bypassed was David Halberstam’s Korean War history, “The Coldest Winter.”
Winners in the four competitive categories — fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature — will each receive $10,000. Other finalists get $1,000. The results will be announced at a Nov. 14 ceremony in Manhattan hosted by author-humorist Fran Lebowitz and featuring honorary medals for author Joan Didion and National Public Radio host Terry Gross.
Fiction nominees Berlinski, Denis Johnson and Lydia Davis all were published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, which has had an enviable run of National Book Awards and Pulitzer Prize winners in recent years, including Jonathan Franzen’s “The Corrections” and Richard Powers’ “The Echo Maker.”
Johnson’s 600-page “Tree of Smoke,” published to near-universal acclaim after taking nine years to write, is a Vietnam War novel that has been compared to such classics as Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” and Graham Greene’s “The Quiet American.”
The other fiction finalist was Jim Shepard’s book of short stories, “Like You’d Understand, Anyway.” No story collection has won since Andrea Barrett’s “Ship Fever,” in 1996.
Besides Hitchens, nonfiction nominees include Edwidge Danticat for her memoir, “Brother, I’m Dying,” Woody Holton’s “Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution” and Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.”
It was the first National Book Award nomination for the British-born Hitchens, who wasn’t even eligible for the prize until last April, when on his 58th birthday he became a United States citizen. He resides in Washington, D.C., and has well lived up to the title of his featured column on Slate, “Fighting Words.” Objects of attack have included Mother Teresa, Henry Kissinger and, much to the unhappiness of his former liberal allies, opponents of the Iraq War.
One anti-war writer, former U.S. poet laureate Robert Hass, is also a book award finalist. Hass, whose “Time and Materials” includes several poems critical of the Iraq invasion, was nominated by a committee presided over by the current poet laureate, Charles Simic. Other poetry finalists are Linda Gregerson’s “Magnetic North,” David Kirby’s “The House on Boulevard St.,” Stanley Plumly’s “Old Heart” and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s “Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006.”
Scholastic, Inc., known to many as the U.S. publisher of the Harry Potter books, finally received a National Book Award nomination in young people’s literature, for Brian Selznick’s “The Invention of Hugo Cabret.”
The other finalists are Kathleen Duey’s “Skin Hunger” and two first-time novels: M. Sindy Felin’s “Touching Snow” and Sara Zarr’s “Story of a Girl.”
The book awards, founded in 1950, are sponsored by the National Book Foundation, a nonprofit organization.

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Also, albeit not specifically about poetry, but a BIG DEAL, here’s the AP story about Doris Lessing, one of the most widely regarded 20th-century novelists:

Britain’s Doris Lessing wins 2007 Nobel Literature Prize
By HILLEL ITALIE
AP National Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — It began as an ordinary day for Doris Lessing, an early riser who had gone shopping without suspecting that the world would be awaiting her return to the brick row house she calls home in North London.
The 87-year-old author, known, if it all, to younger readers for a decades-old classic, “The Golden Notebook,” pulled up in a taxi to a mob of cameras and other electronics and thought that a television show was being filmed on her quiet street.
But Lessing herself was the show, informed by reporters who opened her door that she had won the Nobel Prize for literature.

British writer Doris Lessing, winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in literature, outside her home in north London, Thursday Oct. 11, 2007, receives flowers from a friend, shortly after she was informed of the news of her award. Lessing, who turns 88 in just over a week, is the oldest person to be honored with the prestigious awards given by the Swedish Academy, said Horace Engdahl, the academy’s permanent secretary. Lessing’s work, which has drawn heavily from her time living in Africa, has explored the divide between whites and blacks. (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

“This has been going on for 30 years,” she said, as reporters helped her with the bags.
“I’ve won all the prizes in Europe, every bloody one, so I’m delighted to win them all, the whole lot, OK?” Lessing said, making her way through the crowd. “It’s a royal flush.”
Doris Lessing, Nobel laureate. This year’s winner of the literature prize should inspire a fresh look at the long, prolific career of the author of “The Golden Notebook” and dozens of other works, and a fresh debate about the taste of Nobel judges.
The 87-year-old Lessing, whose novels, short stories, memoirs and plays have reflected her own unexpected journeys across time, space and ideology, was praised Thursday by the Swedish Academy for her “skepticism, fire and visionary power.”
For at least one generation of women, “The Golden Notebook,” Lessing’s 1962 novel about a writer’s personal and political reckoning, was a moment of self-discovery comparable to “Catch-22” for anti-war protesters or “The Catcher in the Rye” for teenagers.
But the Swedish academy’s announcement was stunning even by the standards of Nobel literature judges, who have been known for such surprises as Austria’s Elfriede Jelinek and Italy’s Dario Fo, picks challenged for valuing political dissent over artistic merit.
Lessing, almost two weeks short of her 88th birthday, is the oldest choice ever for a prize that usually goes to authors in their 50s and 60s. Although she continues to publish at least every other year, she has received little attention for her recent work and has been criticized as didactic and impenetrable.
“This is pure political correctness,” American literary critic Harold Bloom, commenting on Lessing’s Nobel, told The Associated Press. “Although Ms. Lessing at the beginning of her writing career had a few admirable qualities, I find her work for the past 15 years quite unreadable … fourth-rate science fiction.”
Lessing, ironically, is herself a critic of political correctness who broke with the British Communist Party in the 1950s, has often presented women (including herself) as vain and territorial and has insisted that “The Golden Notebook” is not a “trumpet for Women’s Liberation,” as she wrote in the introduction for a 1993 reissue.
“I think a lot of romanticizing has gone on with the women’s movement,” she told the AP in a 2006 interview. “Whatever type of behavior women are coming up with, it’s claimed as a victory for feminism — doesn’t matter how bad it is. We don’t seem go in very much for self-criticism.”
The former Doris May Tayler has never liked to be told what to do, or how to think. In her memoir, “Under My Skin,” published in 1994, she remembered herself as a contrarian child with a mantra of three stubborn words: “I will not.”
She didn’t need teachers; only her eyes and mind. As a girl, she read “The Secret Garden,” biblical tales, Rudyard Kipling, history books about Napoleon, the Crusades, and Benjamin Franklin and Charles Dickens, whom she chose against the advice of the nuns in her convent. By age 10, she had written a one-act play featuring Shakespearean monarchs.
“I didn’t go to school much, so I taught myself what I knew from reading,” Lessing, who dropped out as a teenager, said in 2006.
Born in Persia (now Iran) and witness to the collapse of governments (Rhodesia), empires (the British), ideologies (Communism, Nazism) and two of her own marriages, Lessing has long given up on seeing the world as capable of being mastered, whether for good or for evil.
“She is a realist,” says fellow author Shirley Hazzard, whose “The Great Fire” won the National Book Award for fiction in 2003. “Her intention is not to amuse. She’s a serious writer who deals with thing she feels very, very strongly about.”
The variety of her work seems infinite — from colonial Africa in “The Grass Is Singing” to dystopian Britain in “Memoirs of a Survivor” to the new Ice Age in “Mara and Dann.” She has been influenced by Sufism and Communism and collaborated with Philip Glass on a science fiction opera.
But her books are unified by parallel themes: Nothing lasts; nothing really changes. Whether a marriage or an army of millions, she can imagine its birth and its death. She sees herself as a particular kind of person — living in a certain time and place — who could have easily turned out differently.
“When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s,” she said in 2006. “What I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire — nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence?”
In her most recent novel, “The Cleft,” a Roman senator narrates the story of an ancient colony populated only by women. The society seems as stable as the white power structure of “The Grass Is Singing,” the middle-class marriage in “The Fifth Child” or the Roman empire itself.
Then, like Goths at the gates, a man is born. A Monster.
“Before the birth of the first ‘Monsters’ nothing had ever happened — not in ages — to this community of first humans. The first Monster was seen as an unfortunate birth fault. But then there was another, and another, and the realization that it was all going to continue,” Lessing writes.
“We do know they called themselves the people as if there were no others in the world. But that is the common tale of the beginnings of a people.”
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Associated Press writers Matt Moore and Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
http://www.svenskaakademien.se
http://www.nobelprize.org
www.dorislessing.org

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