The Cuckoo

The winner of this year's Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Peter Streckfus's The Cuckoo, chosen by competition judge and Poet Laureate Louise Gluck. It is Gluck's first selection as judge. In this unforgettable, daring first collection, Peter Streckfus offers the reader poems of deep originality and astonishing power. Taking his inspiration from both American and Chinese culture, Streckfus seems an impossible combination of John Ashbery and Ezra Pound. In her Foreword, Gluck praises Streckfus's art for its "nonsense and mystery," its "mesmerising beauty" and "luminous high-mindedness".