The most recent winner of the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize (given to a manuscript of what would be a poet’s first or second collection) is an Australian poet named Chris Andrews.

Andrews and the judge who picked him, Mark Strand, read their work at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Monday night (November 19th).

Mark Strand is not a poet I’ve read much. I don’t own any of his collections and have only read a handful of his poems in some lit mags (mainly Poetry).

Andrews, naturally, was not a poet I had read at all previous to that night.

Usually, I like to get in a little early, go to the gift shop, where they stock the available books by the featured authors, and take a look at what’s available and see which one I want. That way, I avoid the ugly line at the table they set up after the reading and don’t have to wait in line for thirty minutes to get my book signed.

For various reasons (involving a bottle of twelve year old bourbon of which I drank not a drop), I arrived at the Folger Shakespeare Library pretty close to the wire. What with there being a line to pick up my will call ticket, I was feeling a little time sensitive when I ran into the shop.

I decided to pick up Chris Andrews’ Hecht Prize-winning first book, Lime Green Chair. Mainly because I didn’t have strong feeling towards Strand (actually, I briefly confused him with Mark Doty, who have some mistrust towards because I found the Best American Poetry of [Whichever Freaking Year It Was] that he edited to be less than inspiring) and figured it was better to put my money in the hands of a new(er) poet.

Both men were good readers, though in different ways.

Andrews spent less time in chit chat than any other poet so far this year. He very nearly dove straight in and read with a quiet, but compelling voice and diction that caught a musicality in his work that I had missed when glancing through it in my seat. I seemed to catch flutterings of slant rhymes within the lines (more than half the collection consisted of unrhymed, sonnet-like pieces with a first stanza of thirteen lines and an eight line second stanza).

Strand sometimes stumbled over the words, but projected an experienced (and gently dirty-minded) humor as he mostly read from a collection of prose poems.

Probably the best combination of quality poems and quality reading since Theo Dorgan and Paula Meehan read there more than a year ago.

Anyway, I’m nearly done reading Lime Green Chair and I’ll write about it after I’ve had a chance to digest it a bit more.