2024 Four Quartets Prize

Robyn Schiff’s Information Desk wanders the halls of both the physical space of the museum and the interior movements of the mind. It lives in the unknown questionings that are punctuated by almost obsessive meditations on the lives of wasps as she speaks of art, power, family, imagination, and the ways in which a life is constructed as meaning is constructed.

Both the syntax and the interventions of the line breaks keep us moving forward while encountering surprise after surprise, whether it be anecdotal memory, historical fact, or meditations on the making of art (“art history explains / this is how / to micromanage an optimal viewing distance from the eye”). Though the title and subject may sound institutional, the narrative veers off into eros, lushness, beauty, and the lack of boundary between the self and the subjects that surround us. Roaming the halls of the museum, Schiff is attuned to the trespasses that attend to power, collecting, and curating, and the abuses and injustices of capitalism. “I could steer one on one’s way toward / something else. The digressions / are endless.” The digressions are, in fact, the pleasures of these long, fractal sentences.

These poems transform the museum into a microcosm of both the high and the low, the symbols of power and the objects borne of affections, the dangers and the delights of human endeavor. The ingenious thinking—the shaping of these artifacts as narrative of both the arc of history and the intimacy of the mind when left to meditate and imagine their uses—is what gives this collection its soul, its urgency. Schiff is a docent enthralled and enthralling, intimate with all that surrounds her and ready to draw you into her world, into her captivating mind.

Robyn Schiff is the author of four collections of poetry. Information Desk: An Epic was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Schiff has received the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize at the American Academy in Rome and a Guggenheim Fellowship, and she coedits Canarium Books—an independent small press dedicated to publishing exceptional books of poetry. She is a professor at the University of Chicago, where she is Director of the Program in Creative Writing.