Wood’s poems about grief earn national honor

Wood’s poems about grief earn national honor

For the third
year in a row, Susan Wood, professor of English, has received
a high honor for her poetry. Last year she was a recipient
of the distinguished Pushcart Prize for her poem “Diary,” and the year before she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for
poetry.

In September,
Wood’s third book of poems, “Asunder,” was
chosen by judge Garrett Hongo for the National Poetry Series
and will be published by Viking Penguin in 2001.

Each year five
poets act as judges to select five poets’ manuscripts
for publication through the National Poetry Series, which
was begun more than 20 years ago with money from novelist
James Michener. In addition to publication, each winning
poet receives $1,000. This year the five winners were selected
from 50 finalists out of approximately 1,500 manuscripts
submitted.

According to
Wood,“Asunder” is, in part, about “grief
and how we live with it, how, as my friend the late poet
Bill Matthews said, ‘We metabolize grief as fast as
we have to.’”

The book’s
title, “Asunder,” comes from a quote from Virginia
Woolf that Wood chose as the book’s epigraph: “The
beauty of the world has two edges, one of laughter, one
of anguish, cutting the heart asunder.”