Mark Ford’s This Dialogue of One: Essays on Poets from John Donne to Joan Murray (Eyewear Publishing) has won the Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism. The award honors the best book-length works of criticism, including biographies, essay collections, and critical editions that consider the subject of poetry or poets, and carries a $7,500 purse.

In addition to criticism, Ford is the author of four volumes of poetry. Dwight Garner, reviewing Ford’s recent Selected Poems for The New York Times, said Ford is “a poet who pitchforks clashing detail into his lines, as if to destabilize them, to proclaim, as he does in ‘I Wish,’ that ‘every second is underwritten / by an invisible host of dubious connections.’ ”

Finalists for the award include Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry by Paul Celan, translated and edited by Pierre Joris; James Merrill: Life and Art by Langdon Hammer; Mahmoud Darwish: The Poet’s Art and His Nation by Khaled Mattawa; The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind, edited by Claudia Rankine, Beth Loffreda, and Max King Cap; and Where Have You Been? Selected Essays by Michael Hofmann. Each finalist receives a prize of $1,000.