Books by Carl Phillips

The first UK publication from this acclaimed US poet, one of the outstanding lyric poets of our time.

"How does a sentence, // just like that, become prayer?" Part parable, part bestiary, part glossary of possible and impossible loves, Star Map with Action Figures, poem after poem, provides an answer. From the space between punishment and its promise, Phillips quizzes the thousand churlish faces of desire: two boys making love on a riverbank, a horse named Nightmare, the self "a needle pushed through / the stretched canvas of belief." Star Map with Action Figures counters the body's certainty with febrile syntax, challenging the mirror's ability to capture and the lover's willingness to stay. From the "forest that stands at the exact center of sorrow" to the cathedral in the speaker's mind, Star Map with Action Figures charts the severe and glittering histories of intimacy in flux. A king, a willow, a captain, the sea-all themselves, more, less, unsayable and not-become kinds of heroes, shattering the myth of "a limit to what any story could hold onto."

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. The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself--the words to the song--leave him, as helets each go, the wind carrying most of it,some of the words, falling, settling intoinstead that larger darkness, where the smallerdarknesses that our lives were lie softly down."--from "Riding Westward"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? What is the difference, Phillips 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.

Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . . outstrips all diversionary maneuvers." (Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review)The light, for as far asI can see, is that of any number of late afternoons I remember still: how the lightseemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been livinginsider 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.

Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill."e;Like something broken of wing,lying there.Other than breathing's rise, catch,release,a silence, as of some especially woundedanimal that, nevertheless, stillis conscious,you can seestraight through the openeye to where instinct falters becausefor once it has comedivided"e; --from "e;Chamber Music"e;In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor's anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection -- between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch -- and its the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground. Contemporary literature can perhaps claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips's characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever.