The sixth winner of the annual New Criterion Poetry Prize is Bill
Coyle's The God of This World to His Prophet. Mr. Coyle's first
collection of poems spans the divide between the minutely considered
trappings of an often hard-bitten and desolate world and the larger,
more elusive questions of belief. Shifting easily through registers of
sober reflection, gentle satire, and even outright humor, his poems
encompass landscape and dramatic situation with equal skill. Decoding
the import in a stand of leafless trees or recounting the melancholy
ruminations of a solitary figure in winter, Mr. Coyle finds imaginings /
projected on a darkened world of things. Also included are a number of
poems translated from the Swedish that dovetail seamlessly with the
author's own sensibility and concerns. His virtuosic mastery of prosodic
forms, far from occluding his deeply felt subjects, reveals them to us
with great force and immediacy. As Mr. Coyle puts it with characteristic
precision and grace, Artifice, at its heart, is the human touch
describing / lucidly what the world, stripped to its essence, is.