George Green is a pop-culture Juvenal, whose satiric strain is both trenchant and elegiac. The poems in Lord Byron’s Foot move deftly between the back alleys of Trieste and the parking lots of his hometown in Pennsylvania, be tween Chichester Cathedral and the downtown streets and parks of Manhattan where he has lived for three decades. Green’s range and depth of knowledge in these technically accomplished poems might be intimidating if not for the disarming delight and pas sion with which he engages his material and the bizarrely rau cous humor in which the poetry often revels.

Lord Byron’s Foot is the twelfth winner of the annual New Crite rion Poetry Prize. The New Cri terion is recognized as one of the foremost contemporary venues for poetry that pays close atten tion to form. Building upon its commitment to serious poetry, The New Criterion established this annual prize in 2000.