Richard Hugo has selected William Virgil Davis' One Way to Reconstruct the Scene as the 1979 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. In his foreword to the volume Hugo "William Virgil Davis is a poet who, when he writes, contends with a loving self who wants to render the world as found. His battle is the classic one, the memory versus the imagination... 'Memory is the first property of loss,' Davis tells us, and that may be true. At least it is worth considering. Certainly a scene, no matter how initially unattractive, reconstructed lovingly in active language posing as passive recall is a true property of gain. Davis believes in and works to create a world we can humanely attend the second time around, and his poems often provide that second chance."

The winning volume in the 1988 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Out of the Woods by Thomas Bolt. As James Merrill, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has "Here is an up-to-date wrecked cars, glades of debris, polluted streams, all gravely held in Thomas Bolt's unflinching gaze. 'I had found,' he writes, 'the secret center of America.' Given this wealth of evidence, its bleakness and sparkle, we can almost bring ourselves to believe him." A Hill in Virginia In this rude worldMemory pertainsIn bald things,Of promises skipped over, violenceOr accidents of kissing.Read within the deep patinaOf the old stumpOf a shainsawed black walnutIts circularHistory from sex to ruin; Look whereCracked and spattered chunks of cold quartzStuck in mudGlitter up from a dull hill.Downhill, the wrecked punched in windshieldSags whole,An afterimage of collision,Brilliant with sky.

The winning volume in the 1993 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is Thinking the World Visible, by Valerie Wohlfeld. As James Dickey, distinguished poet and judge of the competition, has said, "Valerie Wohlfeld's words give the sense of a poet whose mind has been suddenly freed and is active in a new way. My impression of her is as a spirit-woman, a female shaman or Eve who takes power over the natural world by naming it, using the same words that have always served but with her own truly imaginative angle of vision."

The first collection of poems by Robert Hass, one of contemporary American poetry’s most celebrated and widely read voices, and the 68th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets The winning volume in the 1972 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition is a collection of richly anecdotal, lyric poems. Robert Hass writes about the California coast, about birds, fish, books, friends, present sensations, and the impingements of the past upon the present. Running through the book is a core of love poems, mainly domestic, which muse on the natural order that the affections try to establish even within the wilderness of history and political violence.

Comprised of ironic, unsentimental poems on subjects of everyday life, Poems is the 57th volume of the Yale Series of Younger Poets. The first of seven books of poetry published during Dugan’s lifetime, Poems examines the unusual details of everyday subjects, including waterfalls, house plants, love, war, religion, and the Irish. Explorations inevitably arouse feelings of alienation, defeat, despair, and disenchantment. The poems are also marked by casual humor, mockery, and satire, which produce some of its strongest effects. The tone and style on display in this first book characterize all of Dugan’s subsequent poetry.