Rock Harbor Poems

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.Carl Phillipsis the author of nine previous books of poems, includingQuiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006;Riding Westward; andThe Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. APublishers WeeklyBest Book 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 titlea place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disasterthese 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. "At best, Phillips's poetry captures spare evocations of the sublime, condensed awe and fractal glances of splendor gained in an earnest, meditative state of awareness. Always, the poems inRock Harborare ambitious and brave . . . These poems succeed in inviting the audience to revel in the mystery of seeking meaning from life . . . The results are stunning."Michael Graber,The Commercial Appeal "Phillips's previous volume of poetry explored the often antagonistic negotiations between the devout and the divine, the lover and the loved.Rock Harboris harder and more forceful: 'No' and 'not' are two of the poet's favorite end words. But in these poems, which are at least as erotic as they are religious, 'no' often means 'yes,' and the succumbing is of a bittersweet, little-death sort. In one poem, Phillips asks, 'Isn't it only in / the bracing and first wake of / loss that we guess most cleanly / the speed with which what held us / left us?' The pull that Phillips is resisting grows stronger all the time, and when it recedes it leaves a residue: the 'record-of-where-a-wind-was' to be examined by 'left-to-our-own-devices / acolytes.'"The New Yorker "Other poets have worked with the studiously short line that Phillips generally employs; other poets have been obsessed with the endlessly elaborate negotiation of the body and the soul. No other poet sounds like Carl Phillips because no one else locates that negotiation so squarely within the formal procedures of the poetry: the intricately calibrated tension between baroque syntax and brief line feels simultaneously like the action of the mind and the movement of the body."James Longenbach,Boston Review "The poems inRock Harborare both fo

Carl Phillips is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Rock Harbor; The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and From the Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2001. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

A masterly collection from "one of his generation's most prolific and gifted poets." --Rick Hilles, Boston Review