For the Scribe

For the Scribe, the ninth collection by award-winning poet David Wojahn, continues his explorations of the interstices between the public and the private, the historical and the personal. Poems of recollection and elegy commingle and conjoin with poems which address larger matters of historical and ecological import. The subjects of extinction and apocalypse figure prominently and obsessively in these pages, both in short lyrics and in several lengthy sequences. The poems also evidence the mastery of technique for which Wojahn is renowned, whether he is writing in fixed forms or in free verse. For the Scribe is the most ambitious and searching collection thus far from a poet who has been a named finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetry, winner of the Lenore Marshall Prize from the Academy of American Poets, the O. B. Hardison Award from the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the William Carlos Williams Book Award.

David Wojahn is professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University and also teaches in the MFA in Writing Program of the Vermont College of Fine Arts. He is the author of Spirit Cabinet, The Falling Hour, Late Empire, Mystery Train, Glassworks, Icehouse Lights, and Interrogation Palace, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Wojahn is the recipient of four Pushcart Prizes, the William Carlos Williams Book Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, the George Kent Memorial Prize, and the O. B. Hardison Jr. Poetry Prize, among other honors. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.