Presented to: Loretta Randall Sharp
For: "Doing It"
The award states, "In an impressive year for published verse by Mormons--a great deal of it, all of it at least competent, much of it more than that--Loretta Randall Sharp is a very impressive winner of this award. Her voice is clear, individual and very direct; the confidence with which she controls it is the confidence of having something needful, something both timeless and contemporary, to say. It is a woman's voice addressing women's concerns so that we are all involved men and women. She lives entirely in the contemporary world and her language and her landscape are those of our time. Yet--in "The Slow Way Home" for example--she is completely at ease in the old, unhurried world of India, her compassion and understanding wide enough to acknowledge the ancient customs of that land, aware of the presence of the old and necessary gods. And "Going Home," which I think the finest of this group of striking poems, exhibits a daughter's love and understanding for a sick father, with a lack of sentimentality at once healing and refreshing. It allows the poet to create a poem which shows we can all be 'caught / by fear palpable as salt brine, each / yielding to the inexorable season of love.'"