Background
Phillips, Carl was born in 1959.
( A masterful new collection by one of our most important...)
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 sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374251401/?tag=2022091-20
( Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most ...)
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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374532168/?tag=2022091-20
( What happens when the world as we've known it becomes d...)
What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374530823/?tag=2022091-20
( Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . ...)
Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . . outstrips all diversionary maneuvers." (Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review) 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 facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual. The Rest of Love is a 2004 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374529620/?tag=2022091-20
( Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phil...)
Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections 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. Phillips's sensibility as he questions morality, psychology, and our notions of responsibility is as startlingly original as the poems themselves, whose exacting standards for the line's flexibility and whose argument for a versatile, more muscular syntax bring to American poetry "something not unlike a new musical scale" (The Miami Herald). Quiver of Arrows 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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374530785/?tag=2022091-20
Phillips, Carl was born in 1959.
Bachelor in Greek and Latin, magna cum laude, Harvard University, 1981. Master of Arts in Latin and Classical Humanities, University Massachusetts, Amherst, 1983. Master of Arts in Creative Writing, Boston University, 1993.
He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in Saint Louis. He was a child of a military family, moving year-by-year until finally settling in his high-school years on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. A graduate of Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Boston University, Phillips taught high-school Latin for eight years.
Phillips" work has been published in the Yale Review, Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker and the Paris Review.
Phillips is currently a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. His poems, which include themes of spirituality, sexuality, mortality, and faith, are featured in American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006) and many other anthologies.
In 2011, Phillip was appointed to the judging panel for The Kingsley and Kate Tufts Poetry Awards. Phillips was also a featured poet in the "Picture and a Poem" series for T: The New York Times Style Magazine in December 2015.
( What happens when the world as we've known it becomes d...)
( A masterful new collection by one of our most important...)
( Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phil...)
( Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most ...)
( Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . ...)
(poetry by author of IN THE BLOOD)
Fellow: American Academy Arts & Sciences. Member: American Academy Poets (chancellor, James Merrill Memorial fellowship 2006).