Pastoral: Poems
Description
Carl Phillips is the author of nine previous books of poems, including "Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006";" Riding Westward"; and "The Rest of Love," a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Phillips here creates a shadowy inner landscape, one where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully yet often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us--believing in the possibility of light--seeks to penetrate.
Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us--how to realize the self entirely, and in time--these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the formal backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry? Or when making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent and emotionally nuanced, "Pastoral" enlarges--and also defines--Phillips's already impressive poetic landscape.
"Desire--erotic and spiritual--courses passionately through this collection: the strict shape desire inflicts on the chaos desire lets loose. But Phillips addresses not only passion, but art, history, nature: all, in his hands, are forms of wanting. His rhythms are beautifully and powerfully various--sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant--as he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; [this book] both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes."--Jorie Graham
"In this brilliant fourth collection, foreboding fields and roaming creatures [both] echo the sorrow, alienation, and eros of bodily existence."--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)
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About the Author
Reviews
"Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts. Their affinity with John Donne is apparent, as they range from the mystical to the erotic. A third intensity is their devotion to language; Mr. Phillips writes with an almost whispered, at times almost unbearable elegance, as he reveals and declares some of the innermost truths of the human heart." --Judges' Citation, 1998 National Book Awards for From the Devotions
"'Come back, come back. Tell us of excess' pleads the invocation (from Duncan) opening this stunning new collection from Carl Phillips. And indeed barely contained excess does function as a tutelary deity to this brilliant Romance: the poet questing for searing (even blinding) vision in a demotic world; the poet as seeker of moral instruction through the outrage of flesh.... Desire-- erotic and spiritual-- courses passionately through this collection-- the strict shape desire inflicts on the chaos desire lets loose. But Phillips addresses not only passion, but art, history, nature: all in his hands forms of wanting. His rhythms beautifully and powerfully various-- sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant-- he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes." --Jorie Graham
