We at YUP would like to wish a hearty congratulations to Clare Cavanagh for becoming a finalist for a 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in the Criticism category. Her “rigorously thoughtful” book, Lyric Poetry and Modern Politics: Russia, Poland, and the West, covers the intersection of poetry, national life, and national identity in Poland and Russia, from 1917 to the present, including discussions of Blok, Mi­łosz, Frost, Yeats, Whitman, Akhmatova, among others.

Cavanagh writes that “[t]he book is firstly an overview of twentieth-century Eastern European poetry in its Russian and Polish incarnations. It is also a comparative study of modern poetry on both the Eastern and Western side of the great political divide that came to be known mid-century as the ‘Iron Curtain.’ Finally, it is a polemic with Western postmodern literary and philosophical theories from French poststructuralism and deconstructionism to American cultural criticism and New Historicism.”

For fans of comparative studies in poetry, this is the one to beat. Read the full list of finalists at “Critical Mass.”