The Hecht Prize Anthology 2005 – 2009

Joseph Harrison

Publication: November 8th, 2011

The Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize was launched by Waywiser in 2005, and is awarded annually for the best first or second collection of original poems in English submitted. In its first five years, the contest went from strength to strength, helped in this by a distinguished list of final judges – J. D. McClatchy, Mary Jo Salter, Richard Wilbur, Alan Shapiro and Rosanna Warren.

Thom Gunn once derided the poetry anthology as “at best a convenience for teachers but otherwise a pernicious modern nuisance which keeps readers away from books of poetry”. The Hecht Prize Anthology 2005-2009, ably edited by Joseph Harrison, and containing work by fifty of the poets who reached the contest’s later stages during its first five years, vividly demonstrates how far from the truth Gunn’s generalization was.