Poetic Justice

A university-press title was among the finalists announced last week for the National Book Awards—a selection in the poetry category.

The book, Kathleen Graber’s collection, The Eternal City (2010), marked a revival of sorts for Princeton University Press. In the late 1980s, the press discontinued what had been a noted poetry series. Founded in 1975, Contemporary Poets had published such figures as Jorie Graham, Robert Pinsky, and Alicia Ostriker. The series lapsed for varied reasons, says Hanne Winarsky, a literature and art editor at the press—”mostly just because it didn’t fit with the direction that PUP was and had planned at the time,” she adds, via email.

Fast-forward two decades and the press chose to restart the venture.

For the “relaunch,” it enlisted a new series editor, Paul Muldoon, an Irish-born poet and Princeton professor, who won a Pulitzer in 2003 and is poetry editor at The New Yorker. He, in turn, chose Graber as the inaugural poet.

Graber, who teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University, says Muldoon and in-house editor Winarsky had an interest in her manuscript “at a very early stage” and credits them with the right blend of hands-on and hands-off attention. “They made it clear that every decision regarding the collection was ultimately mine,” writes the poet in an email. “Paul had only one very wise suggestion regarding the sequencing of the poems, and I took his advice.”

The press, which offers a video reading by Graber on its Website, describes The Eternal City as an “eloquent testimony to the struggle to make sense of the present through conversation with the past.” Graber, Princeton says, questions “what it means to possess and to be possessed by objects and technologies” in a collection that “brings together the elevated and the quotidian to make neighbors of Marcus Aurelius, Klaus Kinski, Walter Benjamin, and Johnny Depp.”

Muldoon, via email, underscores Graber’s timeliness: She “is a profoundly serious poet who is extraordinarily well prepared to help us make sense of the difficulties that beset us. But rather than the treatises that so many serious poets offload on us, her poems are real treats.”—Nina Ayoub