One of the oldest and most prestigious poetry contests in this country is the Yale University Award for Younger Poets, started in 1919, to showcase the work of poets under the age of forty. Poets are published in a volume, and their careers are often launched. Past winners have included John Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, Jack Gilbert, and W.S. Merwin. This year the contest was won by Eryn Green, a Ph.D. student in Creative Writing at the University of Denver. Green was selected by writer and poet Carl Phillips, who wrote the book’s introduction.
Green titled his collection Eruv, a Hebrew word for the symbolic boundary that encloses space and allows those adhering to Jewish law to practice certain tasks, many of them ordinary, like wheeling a baby carriage within the space. Green describes eruv as “a ritual enclosure that opens private into public spaces.” The title is a perfect definition for Green’s poems themselves, bringing his perceptions of wilderness, and of life, from the internal public domain, where his words are private, to his readers, those of us lucky enough to experience this small unusual interesting first collection of young, original, and lively poems. Green has written poems all his life, and his subject matter is life itself. His portraits of life are often moving, and real:
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.
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