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Overview
"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
The author of three previous books of poetry From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood Carl Phillips has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
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
The author of three previous books of poetry From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood Carl Phillips has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781555972981 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Graywolf Press |
Publication date: | 03/02/2002 |
Pages: | 96 |
Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d) |
About the Author
The author of three previous books of poetry From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood Carl Phillips has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
A Kind of Meadow
shored
by trees at its far ending,
as is the way in moral tales:
whether trees as trees actually,
for their shadow and what
inside of it
hides, threatens, calls to;
or as ever-wavering conscience,
cloaked now, and called Chorus;
or, between these, whatever
falls upon the rippling and measurable,
but none to measure it, thin
fabric of this stands for.
A kind of meadow, and then
trees many, assembled, a wood
therefore. Through the wood
the worn
path, emblematic of Much
Trespass: Halt. Who goes there?
A kind of meadow, where it ends
begin trees, from whose twinning
of late light and the already underway
darkness you were expecting perhaps
the stag to step forward, to make
of its twelve-pointed antlers
the branching foreground to a backdrop
all branches;
or you wanted the usual
bird to break cover at that angle
at which wings catch entirely
what light's left,
so that for once the bird isn't miracle
at all, but the simplicity of patience
and a good hand assembling: first
the thin bones, now in careful
rows the feathers, like fretwork,
now the brush, for the laying-on
ofsheen.... As is always the way,
you tell yourself, in
poems Yes, always,
until you have gone there,
and gone there, "into the
field," vowing Only until
there's nothing more
I want thinking it, wrongly,
a thing attainable, any real end
to wanting, and that it is close, and that
it is likely, how will you not
this time catch hold of it: flashing,
flesh at once
lit and lightless, a way
out, the one dappled way, back
Chapter Two
Clay
The shape of any thing
is the shape a line makes
around it.
So whatever my body can recall
of another's hands
hard, spent upon it.
So whatever fossil
a feather, a fern
slate surrounds.
If there can be one, the shape
of any line
is its direction.
Shape, direction: the crosstrees.
That point where the two
cross has been narrative,
history our story.
When did I choose
The Flesh, Wanting?
* * *
In Pompeii, it took ash to preserve the struggle against ash.
Abundance
Not just the body be it
as wild loam; as the loom with never a lack
of willing, schooled-enough
hands; or as steady
burning-glass beneath which, smoldering at
last, ah, give up.
But whatever bird, also,
bearing some equally whatever and now
irretrievable small life
where is home. The lip
too, that in its casual meeting with the glass
whose silvered rim
here is faded, here flakes, here
is gone,
meets all the other lips that once knew
and drank from the same glass
an erotics
of cooled distance, all that history
has been, all that memory
is....
Remember the buck, stepping free
of the dark wood,
of the wood's shadow, as if
just for you? And the antlers, you said simply,
branching like hands or
like trees.
I thought of the branching of mistake when,
presumed over,
forgotten,
on all sides at once it sports a fist
full of blooms.
What you must call the blooms,
call them. Prayers; these willed disclosures
Clap of Thunder
Drove out to find one, found
instead a man single-fingering me
toward him.
Every stranger
is an envoy of Fate's
court not to receive whom....
I followed. And There,
'tis done with.
To return to the car,
to drive back to
home as I remembered it, what
else but these,
the unextraordinary motions
that define the life
we most live we
are, most of us, mere context.
And then I stepped inside
of weeping.
And then my hands found,
classically,
my brow,
the usual pose adopted for
disbelief when one believes
that one has failed, has
failed one's art.
You will have seen how a sudden
wind shakes down
from the tree twice picked-over
still some last, lingering fruit, gone
ignored, or unsuspected.
Just so. I began writing.
Dearest Won
Soon, I suspect, I shall be done with
the dove, and the steep rescue its wings
once, in storied flight unfolding, meant
promise of. Confess if I grow used,
now, to a life all jazz-less blow and drag
of storm, it was not always so: before
I'd crossed a lover's trust, only to learn
I did not mind it; before I'd broken
not a heart, but that as-yet deviceless,
still-apt-at-knee-to-buckle child that,
having looked every elsewhere, we turn
at last to the heart's winded field and
find, by a first snow amused, amazed,
finally bewildered. In the scant,
hypnotic stagger to which here, in
the glowing walls of illumination, all
walking is shorn down, I need make
room for no one, with the exception of
my lately familiar but, for all that, no
less esteemed consort: praise. Though
restive as leaves, ever busy sustaining
then spilling the next brilliance, I shall
look to none to be lifted, evenings when
it is all I have wanted: to lie hollowed
out, crowned, gifted, and as pale ... as
pale as if damage could have flesh
that flesh would be. In truth, regret, I
am like damage; be sure: I do not fail.
Study, between Colors
Now, everything comes
simple. Ladder, for
the reaching of what proves
hard to get to.
Dropcloth, guarantee
against whatever falls.
You might have said.
The views, from this room,
are narrow, but go
far, I can see
not only the usual
lives careering towards end,
but some haven't you
stood here? didn't you find
me among them? some
more deliberately than others,
steeped in excess
of dull-headedness, or will,
or what for years I have
called hunger, as as I
call it song,
what the doves in eaves
lately grow fat on, swell,
the way waves do except
never breaking,
they fly like
waves never....
I know
You are blameless.
Earlier, how the sun through
no design of its own cast
seeming shrouds
on the floor's wood
it passed, as the light
passes. The world is
sometimes that clean:
whom could I have
pointed to,
or what, and called thief?
Parable
There was a saint once,
he had but to ring across
water a small bell, all
manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,
both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies
a-shimmer with
that hope especially that
hunger brings, whatever
the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming
into the saint's hand and,
instead of getting,
becoming food.
I have thought, since, of
your body as I first came
to know it, how it still
can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and last gesture
of the fish leaving water
for flesh, for guarantee
they will die, and I cannot
rest on what to call it.
Not generosity, or
a blindness, trust, brute
stupidity. Not the soul
distracted from its natural
prayer, which is attention,
for in the story they are
paying attention. They
lose themselves eyes open.
"All art ..."
Routinely the sea,
unbuckling, outswells
the frame it will
return to, be
held restively
by.
If there is a shadow
now, on the water, if
there are several,
somewhere are those that must
cast them, they will not
stay,
what does?
Our bodies, it turns out,
are not flutes, it
is unlikely that
God is a mouth with nothing
better to do than
push a wind
out, across us,
but we are human,
flawed therefore and,
therefore, shall suit ourselves:
Music
Hard Master
I called out,
Undo me, at last
understanding how
gift, any difficult
knot is by
fingers, time, patience
undone, knowing
too the blade by which
if it means
the best, the most fruit oh,
let the limbs be cut back.
Unbeautiful
Not blond not
well-fashioned not cut
from the enviably
blue silks, imagine, that
medieval fingers stitched into
streamers to be by hands more fair, at
races waved, to say La, let
this horse win,
let that one,
La,
* * *
as in Siena, where she
is treacherous the course a steep
bowl; the one thing sure: that
some of the horses will die,
or broken now, and
wingless be made to,
as the cobbled stones, bucketed,
hosed clean of blood, will
again shine.
Not any of these. More,
Table of Contents
I | |
A Kind of Meadow | 3 |
II | |
Clay | 7 |
Abundance | 8 |
Clap of Thunder | 10 |
Dearest Won | 12 |
Study, between Colors | 13 |
Parable | 15 |
"All art ..." | 17 |
Unbeautiful | 19 |
Hymn | 22 |
The Gods Leaving | 24 |
Black Box | 25 |
Lay Me Down | 27 |
Against His Quitting the Torn Field | 29 |
III | |
And Fitful Memories of Pan | 35 |
IV | |
Afterword | 45 |
Autumn. A Mixed Music | 47 |
Of That City, the Heart | 49 |
Wanted | 51 |
Would-Be Everlasting | 52 |
Billet-Doux | 53 |
A Fountain | 56 |
Animal | 58 |
Portage | 60 |
Hour of Dusk | 62 |
Gesture, Possibly Archaic | 64 |
Retreat | 65 |
V | |
The Kill | 73 |
Notes | 77 |
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