Today the widow of T. S. Eliot awarded the annual prize given to honor a poetry book published in the previous year. Eighty-one-year-old Derek Walcott received the fifteen-thousand-pound prize for White Egrets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

The Nobel laureate, who was compared last year to Eliot in the New York Times Book Review, was accompanied on the shortlist by Simon Armitage, nominated for Seeing Stars (Faber); Annie Freud for The Mirabelles (Picador); John Haynes for You (Seren); fellow Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney for Human Chain (Farrar, Straus and Giroux); Pascale Petit for What the Water Gave Me (Seren); Robin Robertson for The Wrecking Light (Mariner Books); Fiona Sampson for Rough Music (Carcanet Press); Brian Turner for Phantom Noise (Alice James Books); and Sam Willetts for New Light for the Old Dark (Jonathan Cape).

"More than almost any other contemporary poet, Derek Walcott might seem to be fulfilling T. S. Eliot’s program for poetry," poet Karl Kirchwey writes in his NYTBR review of White Egrets last April. "He has distinguished himself in all of what Eliot described as the 'three voices of poetry': the lyric, the narrative or epic, and the dramatic."

The judges expressed similar sentiments. "It took us not very long to decide that this collection was the yardstick by which all the others were to be measured," said chair of judges Anne Stevenson, whose was joined by Bernardine Evaristo and Michael Symmons Roberts. "These are beautiful lines; beautiful poetry."

Make a list of objects. One thing should be from your desk, one from your closet, one a body part, one a thing you covet that belongs to someone else, one enormous, one slippery, and at least one that makes an odd or evocative sound. Now, describe each using a simile. Do this twice for each one. Using as many of the similes as you can, write a poem with a title such as “Checklist to Survive a Nuclear Winter” or “Things That Have Nothing To Do With Grief.”

Small literary press New Issues Poetry and Prose, operating out of the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, has announced the winner of its twelfth annual Green Rose Prize. Texas poet Corey Marks received the two-thousand-dollar prize, given for a manuscript by a poet who has published at least one poetry collection, for "The Radio Tree," which New Issues will publish in the spring of 2012.

The book will be Marks's second poetry collection, following Renunciation, which won the National Poetry Series Open Competition and was published by University of Illinois Press in 2000. Marks, who directs the creative writing program at the University of North Texas, holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston and earned his MFA from Warren Wilson College's low-residency program.

Previous winners include Noah Eli Gordon (chapbook reviewer for Rain Taxi) for A Fiddle Pulled From the Throat of a Sparrow, Joan Houlihan (director of the Colrain Poetry Manuscript Conference) for The Mending Worm, and Martha Rhodes (publisher of Four Way Books) for Perfect Disappearance.

New Issues also accepted runner-up Hadara Bar-Nadav's manuscript "The Frame Called Ruin" for publication in the fall of 2012. Bar-Nadav is the author of the collection A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/IntuiT House, 2007) and the chapbook The Soft Arcade (Cinematheque Press, 2010).