SOURCE: Kumin, Maxine. “The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize—1995.” The Nation, New York 261, no. 21 (18 December 1995): 800-01.

In the following essay, Kumin discusses the poetry of Hacker's award-winning volume, Winter Numbers.

The Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize of ＄10,000, awarded annually for the most outstanding book of poems published in the United States by an American, is co-administered by The Academy of American Poets and The Nation. Previous winners of the prize have been W. S. Merwin (1994), Thom Gunn (1993), Adrienne Rich (1992), John Haines (1991), Michael Ryan (1990), Thomas McGrath (1989), Josephine Jacobsen (1988), Donald Hall (1987), Howard Moss (1986), John Ashbery (1985), Josephine Miles (1984), George Starbuck (1983), John Logan (1982), Sterling A. Brown (1981), Stanley Kunitz (1980), Hayden Carruth (1979), Allen Tate (1978), Philip Levine (1977), Denise Levertov (1976) and Cid Corman (1975).

This year the prize has been awarded to Marilyn Hacker for her book Winter Numbers (Norton). The judges were Cornelius Eady, Alice Fulton and Maxine Kumin, who contributed the accompanying essay.

To page attentively and...