by Category
by Year
2008
AML Award:
Poetry
Presented to:
Warren Hatch
For:
Mapping the Bones of the World
Warren Hatch possesses what he calls “The Fine and Dying Art of Shaping Light into Words.” He is a surveyor, one who maps the human condition and lovingly bequeaths us poetic traces of that terrain. He has the impressive ability to create unforgettable images of the ordinary, awakening in us the sense of our own mortality, our anxiety about death. Hatch calls death the “seed of knowing”: a burden always accompanying us wherever we may go. These poems are filled with specific and intimate images of landscape, that which persists in our absence. We hear the voice of water, wander along Gneiss ridges, and view a knotted fall of ponderosa. We stand on the edge of a canyon, surveying with the surveyor the variegated beauties of a wilderness so like and yet so unlike us. To see it clearly is to know ourselves. We, however, need poetic lenses, the eyes of a guide, to draw the beauty into our souls. Anxiously, we hope such intimacy will not kill us but instead reveal the dying art of shaping light. The Association for Mormon letters is pleased to present an award in poetry to Warren Hatch for “Mapping the bones of the world” published by Signature Books.