Reconnaissance

by Carl Phillips, Jeff Clark (Designed by)

Overview

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 maybe “all we do is all we can do.” In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. These are poems of searing beauty, lit by hope and shadowed by it, from a poet whose work “reinstates the possibility of finding meaning in a world that is forever ready to revoke the sources of meaning in our lives” (Jonathan Farmer, Slate).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374536558
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	09/06/2016
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	64
Sales rank:	901,518
Product dimensions:	5.39(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.16(d)

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of twelve books of poetry, including Silverchest, a finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize, and Double Shadow, winner of a Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His most recent book of prose isThe Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Reconnaissance 3

The Darker Powers 7

For Night to Fall 9

Moralia 10

The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World 11

Steeple 12

Since You Ask 13

Capella 14

Chromatic Black 17

Permission to Speak 18

Discipline 19

For Long to Hold 20

Stamina 23

The Length of the Field 24

The Buried Life 25

After Learning that the Spell is Irreversible 26

From a Land Galled Near-Is-Far 28

Correction 29

Spirit Lake 30

In Which to Wonder Flew a Kind of Reckoning 31

Lowish Hum, Cool Fuss 32

Last Night 33

Foliage 34

The Strong by Their Stillness 37

Thunder 38

Faintly, With Falling Stars 39

Delicately, Slow, the World Comes Back 40

Enough, Tom Fool, Now Sleep 41

Meanwhile, and Anyway 42

Harness 44

Shield 45

At Bay 46

Spring 47

By Force 48

Acknowledgments 51

Editorial Reviews

Praise for Reconnaissance

“Carl Phillips creates smooth currents of language that begin in one place, subtly shift direction and then shift again . . . The sounds and rhythms of these poems are gorgeous, and Phillips, whose awards include the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, isn't afraid to ask unsettling questions.” —Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post

"[Phillips's] poems are driven by the desire to transform truth into beauty. Yet they are scrupulous in their acknowledgement that the truth has, more often than not, been left behind . . . He makes extraordinary beauty true by acknowledging that the beauty we long for is often unreal." —Jonathan Farmer, Slate

"Phillips’s poems wander precisely through the speaker’s epistemology. And this is characteristic of Phillips’s form: a precise wandering in which every line break, stanza, and punctuation mark offers a deliberate and unfamiliar veering. . . Phillips’s patient, mellow insights are a signature of his poetry, as is his origami syntax. The challenge of the language and form is woven by a pristine clarity of thought—a highly organized confusion, an intense awareness of one’s conceptual vertigo. This vertigo is amplified by Phillips’s dancing around the sonnet, often fluctuating between thirteen and fifteen lines, with varying stanza shape and line length. . . Phillips tethers these moments of reflection for us with elegant threads of language, delicate braids of knowing, comfortable that they will most likely disintegrate, snap, or, perhaps, suddenly turn to smoke or light." —Wesley Rothman, Harvard Review

"What we’re being asked to jettison in Reconnaissance is that cool innocence and, in its place, Phillips is daring us—through his own extravagant reckoning—to contend with those wild forces galloping in us, those we try to hold on and ride and those we are—sometimes beautifully—trampled by." —Scout

"One of the country's most talented poets and sentence-weavers." —Saeed Jones, Advocate

“A characteristically bold and beautiful collection from this brilliant lyricist.” —Booklist

“Phillips, who has always wrestled gracefully with human longing, confronted solitude in his most recent collection, Silverchest, an LJ Best Poetry Book. Now he confronts a world that's constantly redefining itself, faster and faster, a world where the truth can't be neatly pinned. Never mind that 'There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both,' these are still finally poems alight with hope.” —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Praise for Carl Phillips

“I have a candidate for the author of the most interesting contemporary English sentences, and he is not primarily a prose writer: the American poet Carl Phillips . . . Like Emily Dickinson, Phillips is always taking in the minute metamorphoses of his surroundings (Dickinson's ‘Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons') as a way of measuring his own ‘internal difference, / Where the Meanings, are.' . . . But he is not a loner; he is, instead, a poet of erotic life as scored for solo contemplation.” —Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

From the Publisher

08/01/2015
"What if all we do is all we/ can do?" What if it's better to see "acceptance as the too-long-/ missing counterweight/ to the staggered weightlessness/ of sorrow, regret—the old/ angers, too?" In his follow-up to Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, Phillips keeps asking himself such questions, and he's at once acquiescent and combative, ready to settle down and acknowledge "what I've/ called the world continues/ to pass for one" yet disagreeing (if silently) "that maybe recklessness/ is overrated" and pleading "why can't innocence/ be instead a boat, slowing coming about?" Is Phillips's interlocutor here the reader or his beloved, whose hand he mistakes "in the night, last night, as mine"? Either way, it's remarkable how these poems, as always elegant, perfectly crafted, and deeply, meditatively interior, roil with doubt, resistance, and desire beneath the surface. That silvery surface shouldn't fool anyone; Phillip opens by "show[ing] the darker/ powers I've hardly shown/ anyone" as he gathers up hurts "just behind my heart, where they blacken/ and thrive" and ends with an open-ended challenge: "I disagree. Touch not the crown—Don't touch me—". VERDICT Phillips dwells insistently in his doubt, perhaps too insistently for some readers, but this collection is highly recommended for anyone ready to go the distance. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal