The 2005 National Book Award winners included two legends and one underdog: a memoir about mourning a life, a collection celebrating the accomplishments of one and a staggering kaleidoscope of war-torn Europe bringing together the lives of many narrators.

W.S. Merwin, who has been nominated seven times, won the poetry award for his book Migration: New and Selected Poems. Literary celebrity Joan Didion won the nonfiction award for The Year of Magical Thinking, and up-and-coming novelist William T. Vollman won the fiction award for Europe Central.

Merwin’s collection, arrang-ed chronologically, follows his artistic development from the lyricism of his early, hymn-inspired work into more complex and experimental forms. Reading through the collection, one can also discern Merwin’s growing boldness within his work, moving away from the mythological and animal imagery of his early collections in 1960 toward bravely autobiographical work. It isn’t long before he moves into meter irregularity, more imaginative narrations and, by the book’s close, Zen-inspired writing. Threaded throughout the entire collection, however, is a sense of movement fueled by melancholy, but ultimately steered by hope. In “The Crossroads of the World Etc.,” from The Moving Target, he writes: “Gutters made in my time rounded with/ The wounded in mind/ The streets roped off for the affectionate/ Will do for the/ Mutilated/ If I/ Lie down in the street and that smoke comes out of me/ Who/ Was it/ It was a night like this that the ashes were made/ Before that/ Was always the fire.”

Joan Didion has perhaps garnered more attention than any other author in the past year, if not for the quality of her most recent book, then for the melodrama surrounding her. In 2003, Didion’s husband, writer John Donne, died unexpectedly of a heart attack while their only child lay comatose in a hospital, the victim of septic shock. The Year of Magical Thinking is Didion’s rambling, book-length essay making sense of these events and revolving around the mantra “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.”

The prose is grandiose, self-indulgent and redundant, as is befitting; this is a book about grief and grieving is inherently self-involved. This is, first and foremost, a personal project: Didion writes in the opening chapter, “This is a case in which I need whatever it is I think of to be penetrable, if only for myself.”

Still, these things make for frustrating reading, especially because the biting clarity and freshness of much of Didion’s prose is lost in repetition. Regardless, Didion deftly steers the book through an ambitious litany of epic themes: death, illness, luck, marriage, children, memory, grief, sanity and life itself. While such a project inevitably falls flat at times in the face of such lofty intentions, on the whole, Didion is able to address these concepts with finesse, subtlety and quiet revelation.

Vollman, a young and impressively prolific author, was a surprise win in the fiction category for the latest of his characteristically ambitious works. Europe Central amasses 36 fictional and historical narratives (including those of the aggrieved composer Shostakovich, the disillusioned artist Kathe Kollwitz and the memorable SS officer Kurt Gerstein), footnotes and images of the telephone and steel to create an image of technological progress benefitting the military. With beautifully cryptic prose, Vollman leads his reader by the wire into the Nazi seizure of Poland, the siege of Leningrad and Hitler’s Aryan delusions.

Vollman writes, “Now’s the time to gaze across all those red-grooved roof-waves oceaning around, all the green-tarnished tower-islands rising above white facades which grin with windows and sink below us into not yet completely telephone-wired reefs; now’s the time to enjoy Europe Central’s café umbrellas like anemones, her old grime-darkened roofs like kelp, her hoofbeats clattering up and bellnotes rising, her shadows of people so far below in the narrow streets. Now’s the time, because tomorrow everything will have to be, as the telephone announces, obliterated without warning, destroyed, razed, Germanified, Sovietized, utterly smashed. It’s an order. It’s a necessity. ”

A lengthy 750-some pages, Vollman’s book is redundant and pretentious in its self-indulgence, but with its striking imagery and harrowing accounts of a world dissolved into chaos, it is also one of the most commanding novels in recent memory.