Davidson Poet Tony Abbott Wins Statewide Prize for Poetry Book
10/13/2006
Contact: Bill Giduz 704/894-2244 or bigiduz@davidson.edu
Re-print courtesy of Davidson College

The winning volume, entitled The Man Who, consists of about fifty narrative poems about characters real and imagined that Abbott links with the first three words of their titles.

The Young Award is the Council’s top annual prize, and was presented at Catawba College on the organization’s Awards Day, when prize winners and other poets across the state gathered to celebrate their work.

The judge for the competition was Phebe Davidson, a renowned poet and retired college professor. In naming Abbott’s book as winner among eleven entries, she praised his work as “carefully wrought poems leading the reader to a strong sense of humanity and hope in a world where circumstances often seem to point us another way.” Davidson continued, “With an artfully managed conversational tone, these poems border on the profound.”

Abbott, who has published three previous books of poetry and a novel, noted that “Every male is ‘a man who.’ Once I started thinking about that common denominator, I found tons of characters to write about. The titles allowed me to think and develop the poems from their points of view.”

For example, the man who shouted “Good stuff!” pays tribute to his longtime, enthusiastic departmental colleague Gil Holland. The man who writes with his eyes honors the recently deceased Joe Martin of Charlotte, a friend who lived the last years of his life paralyzed by Lou Gehrig's disease. The man who died in Penn Station is the late contemporary architect Louis Kahn, whose funeral was attended by three very surprised separate families who previously knew nothing of each other.