The finalists for the 2007 National Book Award for poetry have been announced. I reproduce the foundation’s press release. Please do not mistake these obsequious descriptions of the authors for anything I have written.
Linda Gregerson, Magnetic North (Houghton Mifflin Company). Magnetic North is a bold collection that explores the intersections of history, science, and art. Linda Gregerson is the author of Waterborne, The Woman Who Died in Her Sleep, and Fire in the Conservatory. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she teaches Renaissance literature and creative writing at the University of Michigan. Among her many awards and honors are an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, two Pushcart Prizes, and a Kingsley Tufts Award. She lives in Michigan.

Robert Hass, Time and Materials (Ecco/HarperCollins). These poems are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. Robert Hass was born in San Francisco and lives in Berkeley, California, where he teaches at the University of California. He served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 1995 to 1997 and was a National Book Award Finalist in 1996 (for Sun Under Wood). A MacArthur Fellow and a two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, he has published poems, literary essays, and translations.

David Kirby, The House on Boulevard St. (Louisiana State University Press). Long-lined and often laugh-out-loud funny, these poems encompass many things, including the heated restlessness of youth, the mixed blessings of self-imposed exile, and the settled pleasures of home. The Robert O. Lawton Distinguished Professor of English at Florida State University, David Kirby is the author of numerous books, including the poetry collections The Ha-Ha and The House of Blue Light. He is a recipient of the Brittingham Prize in Poetry and a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Stanley Plumly, Old Heart (W.W. Norton & Company). Plumly’s tenth collection of poems confronts and celebrates mortality—in the detailed natural world, in the immediacy of the loss of friends, and in personal encounters. Stanley Plumly won the Delmore Schwartz Award and was recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, among other honors. He is currently writing a meditation on John Keats and lives in Maryland where he teaches at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Ellen Bryant Voigt, Messenger: New and Selected Poems 1976-2006 (W.W. Norton & Company). This collection arranges poems from the author’s six highly praised books alongside a group of astonishing new pieces. Ellen Bryant Voigt is the author of six collections of poetry and The Flexible Lyric, a collection of craft essays. Her poems, which have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Nation, and many literary journals, were selected for a Pushcart Prize and Best American Poetry in 1993. She was also a National Book Award Finalist in 2002. Voigt has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund. She teaches in the low-residency MFA Program for writers at Warren Wilson College. She lives in Marshfield, Vermont, and is currently Vermont State Poet.

Who would you like to see on this list? Please post alternates.