Carl Phillips
Author
Language
English
Description
Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill.
"Like something broken of wing,
lying there.
Other than breathing's rise, catch,
release,
a silence, as of some especially wounded
animal that, nevertheless, still
is conscious,
you can see
straight through the open
eye to where instinct falters because
for once it has come
divided"
-from "Chamber Music"
In the art of falconry, during training the tether between...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
How do we say no to despair, and instead take the risk of believing in something that offers no guarantee? Phillips reflects on the instability of life and love, and examines the past as both history and memory. Explore how the past can teach us and mislead us, and make us hesitate in the face of love.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The light, for as far as
I can see, is that of any number of late
afternoons I remember still: how the light
seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living
insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about
that one clear note it gives.
-from "Late Apollo III"
In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off...
5) Silverchest
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Comparing Any Human Life to a "restless choir" of impulses, variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh collection of poems, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: "now risk, and now / faintheartedness." In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets -- There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both. The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and "all we do is maybe all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself
-the words to the song-leave him, as he
lets each go, the wind carrying most of it,
some of the words, falling, settling into
instead that larger darkness, where the smaller
darknesses that our lives were lie softly down."
-from "Riding Westward"
What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able-or less willing-to distinguish...
9) Speak low
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which...
10) Rock Harbor
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poets
Wind as a face gone red with blowing,
oceans whose end is broken stitchery-
swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,
shimmer-and-coil, invitation... You Know
the kind of map I mean. Countries as
distant as they are believable ...
-from "Halo"
Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.
Here, in his...
Author
Series
Yale series of younger poets volume 115
Language
English
Formats
Description
What Noise Against the Cane is a lyric quest for belonging and freedom, weaving political resistance, Caribbean folklore, immigration and the realities of Black life in America. Desiree C. Bailey begins by reworking the epic in an oceanic narrative of bondage and liberation in the midst of the Haitian Revolution. The poems move into the contemporary Black diaspora, probing the mythologies of home, belief, nation and womanhood. Series judge Carl Phillips...
Author
Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Carl Phillips has aptly described his work as an "ongoing quest"; Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the...
Author
Publisher
Yale University Press
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an "apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered." Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community. In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird...
Author
Series
Publisher
Graywolf Press
Pub. Date
[2014]
Language
English
Description
The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing. In six insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the...