Two new books of poetry have recently reached my hands (consolation prizes from contests that I entered and did not win). The first, Mutiny Gallery by B.K. Fischer, won the 2011 T.S. Eliot Prize from Truman State Univ. The second, The Madeleine Poems by Paul Legault, won the 2011 Omnidawn Poetry Prize.

What I find most interesting is that neither is a mere (mere?!?) collection of poems, but a book-length concept. Ms. Fischer’s book is a novel in poems—not necessarily a single poem in numerous, identically shaped parts, such as Seth’s Golden Gate or Tennyson’s In Memoriam, but a series of distinct poems that comprise a chronological series. Indeed, the publisher has dubbed it “a road trip novel-in-verse.” It tells a tale of a mother who runs away with her young son, fleeing, it seems, an abusive husband. Details of their current flight and past life are revealed through a series of museums that they visit along the way.

Mr. Legault’s book does not seem to impose any chronological narrative. The poems spill freely across the page, with little to suggest a unifying genius—some are only two lines long, others comprise sequences wandering across the breadth of several pages. All, however, share the conceit—or is it more of a gimmick?—of the name “Madeleine” in the title.

Ms. Fischer’s poetry at times exhibits an alluringly mischievous approach to language, marked by an engaging display of compression and elision; at other times, however, it reads more like a blog entry. Mr. Legault’s book mostly left me scratching my head, though of course, the same can be said of much of contemporary American poetry, which seems to combine the solipsism and sparseness of the Deep Image or American Surrealist movement with French Absurdism (and, one may go so far, Computer-Generated Nonsequitur). Indeed, I had the suspicion, leafing through this book, that many of the individual poems were first penned under different titles, until the poet was inspired to impose a unifying structure in the form of the cryptic Madeleine sobriquet.

Which brings me back to my earlier point—is it becomingly increasingly necessary for a contest-winning book of poetry to be more than a straightforward collection, but rely upon an overarching theme or concept? Has poetry become too homogenized, to the point that a manuscript requires something more to distinguish it from the rest? Or does simply thinking in terms of a book-length project imply a grander genius that demands the attention of editors and reviewers? It’s possible, too, that these and other poets have an unacknowledged debt to Bell’s Book of the Dead Man, the influence of which, I think, will not fully be appreciated for many years to come. In any case, I envy those poets graced with the time and wherewithal to conceive and execute such a project. I just wish I could be as enamored of the individual components as I might be of the concept overall.