We are pleased to announce the winners of the second annual First Things Poetry Prize. T. O. Brandon has won first place for his poem “Madonna and Child (after Giotto).” This year’s external judge, Dana Gioia, called the poem “as luminous as the Giotto painting that inspired the author”:
It describes the painting with brilliant exactitude. Yet every line rings with verbal music, not just in its rhymes and rhythms but in the careful choice of metaphorical verbs. Out of that sensual mix, the miracle of the Incarnation reveals itself. It is an epiphanic poem—a shining forth in which the eternal calmly manifests itself in the physical materials of art.
Brandon is an educator in Nashville, Tennessee. His poetry has appeared in New Verse Review and Literary Matters.
Brian Brodeur has won second place for “Not Versed in Country Things,” which describes the slow restoration of an old barn. “Written in six carefully shaped stanzas,” Gioia noted, “it revels in both the details of carpentry and the craft’s vocabulary. It becomes a sort of allegory of how honoring the past clarifies the present.”
Brodeur is the author of four books of poetry. His latest, Some Problems with Autobiography (2023), won the 2022 New Criterion Poetry Prize. Recent poems and literary criticism have appeared in the Hopkins Review, the Hudson Review, and Pushcart Prize XLIX. He lives with his wife and daughter in the Whitewater River Valley.
Both poems will be published in the October issue of First Things and will receive cash awards of $2,000 and $1,000 respectively.
The First Things Poetry Prize is an annual award for a formally accomplished poem of up to forty lines. The magazine has a longstanding commitment to poetry, publishing some of the leading poets of the last thirty years in its pages. We are pleased to continue this commitment to the art of poetry with an annual prize thanks to the generous support of the Tim & Judy Rudderow Foundation.
