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Overview
Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive—and one of poetry's most essential—contemporary voices. 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 Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.
These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.
Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466878952 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 08/26/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 144 KB |
About the Author
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.
Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
Speak Low
By Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2009 Carl PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7895-2
CHAPTER 1
Speak Low
The wind stirred — the water beneath it stirred accordingly ...
The wind's pattern was its own, and the water's also. The
water in that sense was the wind's reflection. The wind was,
to the water, what the water was to the light that fell there,
or appeared to fall, spilling as if the light were a liquid, or as
if the light and the water it spilled across
were now the same.
It is true that the light, like the water, assumed the pattern of
what acted upon it. But the water assumed also the shape
of what contained it, while the light did not. The light seemed
fugitive, a restiveness, the less-than-clear distance between
everything we know we should do, and all the rest — all
the rest that we do. Stirring, as the wind stirred it, the water
was water — was a form of clarity itself, a window we've
no sooner looked through than we've abandoned it for what
lies past that: a view, and then what comes
into view, or might,
if we watch patiently enough, steadily — so we believe, wishing
for what, by now, even we can't put a name to, but feel certain
we'll recognize, having done so before. It looked, didn't it,
just like harmlessness. A small wind. Some light on water.
Southern Cross
When I woke, I was still on top of him. Darkness, to
darkness. The taking of leave again until leave-taking
becomes, itself, souvenir, the only one I keep — that's
worth keeping. See how it begins to look like courtesy,
in the right light,
with a little distance? Steadily, without
filling it, not ever, a silence falls into, through, into that
narrow space between what I'd rather not know and
everything I know. It falls like chance, what's possible,
and the possibilities fall open in turn to every side of me,
a first falling crop of snow, doors that the wrong wind
sometimes gets sudden hold of,
then loses, as now.
When it comes to the gods always crippling those whom
they love most, as a way of ensuring in the beloved both
fear and need — where, in fact, does it ever say so? Did I
make that up, too? All of it? It's a myth in my head? And
if I've been living as if it weren't a myth, but something
more than that — a truth, instructive?
* * *
I think the sea must be,
to the ocean, as disappointment is to sorrow, that it's like
the difference between granting mercy to none of those
who suffer, and withholding it from all who do: how they're
not the same things, exactly; I don't care
how it seems.
When I woke, I was still on top of him — still inside him.
The sea isn't far from us, it can't be, I remember thinking:
through the dark, I could smell the sea. It isn't ocean, at all.
Mirror, Window, Mirror
Yes, any sky at night, when the flickering of snow-lightning gently
punctuates it, whatever it is when it's
not bewilderment, or daring, and
not fear either, also
the mottled bark of sycamores
in autumn for where the skin
was like that. Yes.
* * *
— But more like arousal,
or more instead like the mind just
before the idea of arousal courses
bluntly through it?
* * *
That part about the body
asking for it,
to be broken into — is that the first, or last part?
Conquest
Speaking to himself, I think, not me, You have wanted
more than was yours to wish for, he said — as if even
to wishing the laws of modesty and excess could be applied,
and should be. We slept. I dreamed.
We'd sworn
never to do harm; then sworn instead to keep trying hard
not to — A kind
of progress ...
* * *
In the dream, he was powerful:
a hawk,
or hawklike — this time, easily distinguishable
from the gentler animals and that relentlessness with which,
like beaten slaves by now
used to it, they rise, and they fall.
Rubicon
Like that feeling inside the mouth as it makes of obscenity
a new endearment. Like a rumormonger without sign among
the deaf,
the speechless. Having been able, once, not only
to pick out the one crow in a cast of ravens, but to parse darker,
even more difficult distinctions: weakness and martyrdom;
waves, and the receding fact of them as they again
come back;
bewilderment and, as if inescapable, that streak of cruelty to
which by daybreak we confess ourselves resigned, by noon
accustomed, by night
devoted — feverish: now a tinderbox
in flames, now the flames themselves, that moment in intimacy
when sorrow, fear, and anger cross in unison the same face,
what at first can seem almost
a form of pleasure, a mistake as
easy, presumably, as it's forgivable. I suspect forgetting will be
a very different thing: more rough, less blue, more lit, and patternless.
Captivity
I
In the book of the body that is yours — where it's never as late
as I had thought it was, though I routinely fail, forget still
not to call it my own —
in the book of my body that is finally
yours only, the wind picks up, the clouds of everything that
I've been wrong about in this life pass singly overhead as if
for review, their cast
shadows meanwhile, with the unstable
camaraderie of exiles from the start united solely in their desire,
for now, to be anywhere else, little more than that,
pass also ...
Oh, sometimes it is as if desire itself had been given form, and
acreage, and I'd been left for lost there. Amazement grips me,
I grip it back, the book shuts slowly: Who shuts it? You?
II
Memory, awareness. Expectation. A light rain falls ... That
there are three of us in the room
isn't clear at first, though it is
always the three of us, naked, strangers who nevertheless belong
together, but so briefly, I've no sooner assigned names to what
happens here, the names detach, reassign themselves: this one,
and now this one ...
It makes little difference, any more than
vision does, in a room this dark. It's not by vision I tell apart
the two of them, but how the one smells like something checked
coming gradually unchecked, neither rage exactly, nor triumph
mixed with it, but not unlike that; to the other a touch that brings
everything back: the promises in their not-yet-broken state,
the brokenness after; the distilled sorrow, inside that —
* * *
— How delicately, as if with care, the dark holds the nakedness that
is the three of us, turning each to each, unappeasable, in constellation ...
Lighting the Lamps
I've bloomed twice in this life already.
Once, as a fever, in its blooming.
The second time —
It was like when a raven unfolds
its blackery to its fullest span and, having risen,
glides now at that angle which suggests the glamour
of a thing stolen for a last chance — brief,
maybe, but at least resonant — at a life
that's better. Doesn't pattern require — to be seen
as pattern — not just repetition but, as well, eventually,
the interruption of it? As the shore
is the wave's interruption? As mistake interrupts
what had shown no flaw? What I know
is the raven was never sorrow. Wasn't — voiced,
or silent — the sign for it. It crossed the meadow. It
pulled its raven-shadow with it. It disappeared.
To Drown in Honey
Now the leaves rush, greening, back. Back now,
the leaves push greenward. — Some such song, or
close to. I forget the most of it. His voice, and
the words pooling inside it. And the light for once
not sexual, just light. The light, as it should be ...
You can build for yourself a tower to signal from.
Can become a still life. A slow ruin. You can
walk away. They all say that. Sir, I see no way
out of it. I have put my spade to the black loam
that the mind at one moment lets pass for truth,
at the next, oblivion. I have considered. I know
what's buried there: emptiness and renunciation and
ash, and ash ... Why, then, so suddenly — overnight
almost — all the leaves again? Why now, rushing back?
Gold on Parchment
The rocks here are volcanic. They rise from the sea —
stand above it — only to be covered by it, and then
disclosed again in the wave's receding. The waves
sheathe the rock's face with departure's pattern —
then the pattern goes too ... Earlier, when the tide
was low, you could have seen a lone egret walking
the zones between the rocks: entirely white; hunting;
what was it hunting? Where were you? The waves
broke farther from shore, so what passed now between
the rocks was all sea foam, its white the same white
as the egret's, against it the bird seeming, a moment,
to have disappeared, invisibility seemed a thing worth
envying, though I do not forget, mostly, the difference
between the kind of invisibility one can wield — a form
of power — and the other kind, that gets imposed from
outside, and later fastens like character, or dye, as if
invisibility were instead a dye, and the self a spill
of linen, Egyptian cotton: whore —
Wave covers rock,
and then draws back, recessional. The rock glistens
with it. Pretty, isn't it? — Isn't it? In the day, it's like
a boy's hand passing somewhere between leisurely
and impatiently back through his hair again, until it
lies in the place that — today, at least — he thinks he'd
like it to forever. Your hand still does that ... But in
the night — even a moonless night — the wave passes
not like a hand at all, but like recognition, as when
the mind at last recognizes the body's corruption as
absolute and (unlike a wave) irreversible, and the body —
or the mind's idea of it — re-emerges, stripped of its
former willfulness, perhaps, but not of its will to be
free, more free, and not of its indifference to the costs
of freedom. Memory as a space, like any other, to be
crossed or not crossed, regretless, any time we choose —
I remember that. We called ourselves the lucky ones.
Called the sea — the sea: we could turn our backs to it.
In a Perfect World
Equally, the black lake that the skiff sails across,
and the skiff also. Wingbeat. A belief in evil
having not yet displaced entirely a belief in the power
to turn evil away. Laughter. Any number of small
voices in a field unfolding. Patterns like the one
where arrogance leads to shame, shame to anger,
until from anger — via the suffering called loss, called
grieving for it: at last, compassion. Hoofbeat. Bluegrass.
Persuasion slowly brushstroking its way back into
what had seemed the world. A shadow prowling
the not-so-clear-anymore perimeter of Who says so?
A single mother-of-pearl stud catching parts of the light —
for now, holding them. Troy is burning. Let us
make of what's left a sturdiness we can use to the end.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Speak Low by Carl Phillips. Copyright © 2009 Carl Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Epigraph,
Speak Low,
Southern Cross,
Mirror, Window, Mirror,
Conquest,
Rubicon,
Captivity,
Lighting the Lamps,
To Drown in Honey,
Gold on Parchment,
In a Perfect World,
Detachment,
The River in Motion and in Stillness,
Happiness,
Distortion,
Porcelain,
The Damned,
Directions from Here,
Night Song,
Storm,
Topaz,
The Moonflowers,
Late Empire,
Volition,
Reciprocity,
Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices,
Naming the Stars,
Beautiful Dreamer,
The Plains of Troy,
The Centaur,
A Little Moonlight,
Landfall,
Living Together,
Cloud Country,
Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,
The Raft,
Sterling,
Husk,
Until There's Nothing, Just the Sea, a Sea of Leaves,
Notes,
Acknowledgments,
Also by Carl Phillips,
Copyright,