QUICK TAKES - April 15, 2009

Fanny Howe was announced Tuesday as the winner of the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement.

The Chicago-based Poetry Foundation, which presents the award, said Howe’s poetry “can be elusive and hermetic, and then abruptly and devastatingly candid; it is marked by the pressures of history and culture, yet [is] defiantly, transcendently lyrical.”

Howe, 68, lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Her books include “On the Ground,” “The Lyrics” and “Gone.”

The foundation also awarded a $10,000 prize for criticism to Ange Mlinko, whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation and on the Poetry Foundation website.

-- Lee Margulies