Bollingen Prize

Frank Bidart, poet and professor of English at Wellesley College, has won the $100,000 Bollingen Prize in Poetry for 2007.  Bloomberg.com reports:

A three-judge panel said Bidart's poems -- ``eerie, probing, sometimes shocking, always subtle -- venture into psychic terrain left largely unmapped in contemporary poetry.''

The Bollingen Prize in Poetry, awarded biennially by the Yale University Library, was established in 1949 by Paul Mellon, and recognizes the best book published or the lifetime achievement of an American poet. Bidart's volumes include ``Star Dust,'' published in 2005 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Bidart is ``one of the most important, influential poets in the country,'' William Cain, head of Wellesley's English department, said in a statement. Other Bollingen Prize winners have been Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, W.H. Auden, E.E. Cummings, Louise Gluck, Adrienne Rich and Jay Wright.

Bidart's works include Star Dust (FSG), Music Like Dirt (Sarabande Books), In the Western Night: Collected Poems: 1965-90, and Desire