Works by
Carl Phillips
(Poet, Writer)
[1959 - ]

Poetry

• Speak Low: Poems (Mar 31, 2009) -- Finalist 2009 National Book Award for Poetry
  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.

• Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007)
  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.

• Riding Westward: Poems (2007)
  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.

• The Rest of Love (2004) -- Finalist National Book Award; Finalist, 2004 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry
  Examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe.  Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual.

• Rock Harbor (2002)
  Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.

• The Tether (2001) -- Winner Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
  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."

• Pastoral -- Winner, 2000 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry; Finalist National Book Award

• From the Devotions (1998) -- Finalist National Book Award in poetry
  Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul--ever restless--come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips's reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth.

• Cortege (1995) -- Finalist National Book Critics Circle Award' Finalist Lambda Literary Award for Gay Men's Poetry

• In the Blood (1992) -- Winner 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize

Other

• American Alphabets: 25 Contemporary Poets (2006), David Walker, ed.
  Includes works by Agha Shahid Ali, Arthur Sze, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Bob Hicok, Bruce Beasley, Bruce Weigl, C. D. Wright, Carl Phillips, Carol Muske-Dukes, David St. John, Franz Wright, Larry Levis, Lee Upton, Linda Bierds, Linda Gregerson, Marianne Boruch, Mark Doty, Mary Ruefle, Norman Dubie, Pamela Alexander, Rita Dove, Robin Behn, Susan Stewart, Thomas Lux, and Yusef Komunyakaa

• Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry (2004)
  The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the imagination and the will, even when, as Phillips states in his title essay, "the last thing that most human beings seem capable of trusting naturally-instinctively-is themselves, their own judgment."

• Philoctetes (2003), T.B.L. Webster, ed. with Carl Phillips and Diskin Clay
  Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the general editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the play. En route to fight the Trojan War, the Greek army has abandoned Philoctetes, after the smell of his festering wound, mysteriously received from a snakebite at a shrine on a small island off Lemnos, makes it unbearable to keep him on ship. Ten years later, an oracle makes it clear that the war cannot be won without the assistance of Philoctetes and his famous bow, inherited from Hercules himself. Philoctetes focuses on the attempt of Neoptolemus and the hero Odysseus to persuade the bowman to sail with them to Troy. First, though, they must assuage his bitterness over having been abandoned, and then win his trust. But how should they do this--through trickery, or with the truth? To what extent do the ends justify the means? To what degree should personal integrity be compromised for the sake of public duty? These are among the questions that Sophocles puts forward in this, one of his most morally complex and penetrating plays.