Pastoral

"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.

Publishers Weekly

"When I think of desire,/ it is in the same way that I do// God: as parable, any steep/ and blue water, things that are always/ there, they only wait// to be sounded." The lyric sounding of human feeling against desire, the natural world and religious striving has been reenvisioned by Phillips over three books, including last year's NBA-finalist From the Devotions. In this brilliant fourth collection, foreboding fields and roaming creatures ("mouths gaped not/ in song but for those night-flying// insects that now, but too early, too/ readily, ascend") continue to echo the sorrow, alienation and eros of bodily existence. The fragmented diction and structure in poems such as "Unbeautiful" are contrasted by the dazzling "Hymn," written in the poet's classically slim tercets and singing to "...one more of many other nights/ figured with the inevitably/ black car, again the stranger's// strange room entered not for prayer/ but for striking prayer's attitude, the body// kneeling, bending, until it finds/ the muscled pattern that predictably, given strain and// release, flesh assumes." At the collection's center is the five-part lyric sequence "And Fitful Memories of Pan," in which Phillips's tireless attention to the body finds the god's hands are "shaped by damage, fitted/ for it." The collection's last poem, "The Kill," ends with the speaker-as-hunter: "one animal at attack,/ the other--the other one/ suffering, and love would// out all suffering." This cautiously hopeful note suggests less a reconciliation than a giving over of the self to encounter, one where the poet's various concerns come together beautifully. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

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.