Great Regulars: The poet Jo Shapcott, who began the year

by winning the Costa book of the year award for her collection Of Mutability, has ended 2011 by being named the latest recipient of the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry.

Decided by a committee of "eminent men and women of letters" selected by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, the medal is given for either a body of work or for an individual poem, and counts among its previous recipients WH Auden, who took it in 1936, Siegfried Sassoon and John Betjeman.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Jo Shapcott wins Queen's gold medal for poetry

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[Rita] Dove's collection, The Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry, is the Pulitzer prize-winning poet and professor of English's pick of the best US poetry of the last 100 years. [Helen] Vendler, a critic and Harvard professor, laid into the book in an excoriating write-up in the New York Review of Books, criticising Dove for deciding "to shift the balance, introducing more black poets and giving them significant amounts of space, in some cases more space than is given to better-known authors".

Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg and Sterling Brown are left out of the anthology--although Dove explains in her introduction that this was down to a rights issue: Penguin's budget was not enough to secure rights to include their poems in the book.

from Alison Flood: The Guardian: Poetry anthology sparks race row

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