Carl Phillips

Winner of the 2014 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty, the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize is the oldest annual literary award presented in the United States. Ansel Elkins’s poetry collection, Blue Yodel, is the 109th volume to be so honored. Esteemed poet and competition judge Carl Phillips praises Elkins for her “arresting use of persona,” calling her poems “razor-edged in their intelligence, Southern Gothic in their sensibility.” In her imaginative and haunting debut collection, Elkins introduces readers to a multitude of characters whose “otherness” has condemned them to live on the margins of society. She weaves blues, ballads, folklore, and storytelling into an intricate tapestry that depicts the violence, poverty, and loneliness of the Deep South, as well as the compassion, generosity, and hope that brings light to people in their darkest times. The blue yodel heard throughout this diverse compilation is a raw, primal, deeply felt expression of the human experience, calling on us to reach out to the isolated and disenfranchised and to find the humanity in every person.

The award-winning poet Carl Phillips's invaluable essays on poetry, the tenth volume in the celebrated Art of series of books on the craft of writing In seven insightful essays, Carl Phillips meditates on the craft of poetry, its capacity for making a space for possibility and inquiry. What does it mean to give shapelessness a form? How can a poem explore both the natural world and the inner world? Phillips demonstrates the restless qualities of the imagination by reading and examining poems by Ashbery, Bogan, Frost, Niedecker, Shakespeare, and others, and by considering other art forms, such as photography and the blues. The Art of Daring is a lyrical, persuasive argument for the many ways that writing and living are acts of risk. "I think it's largely the conundrum of being human that makes us keep making," Phillips writes. "I think it has something to do with revision--how, not only is the world in constant revision, but each of us is, as well."

Winner of the 2013 Yale Series of Younger Poets prize Eryn Green’s Eruv is the latest winner of the oldest annual literary award in the United States, which originated in 1919 to showcase the works of exceptional American poets under the age of forty. Green joins an esteemed roster of past winners that includes Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, W. S. Merwin, and Robert Hass, and as Carl Phillips, competition judge and chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, points out, this collection “reminds us how essential wilderness is to poetry—a wilderness in terms of how form and language both reinvent and get reinvented.” Taking its title from the Hebrew word for a ritual enclosure that opens from private into public spaces, Eruv includes poems of love, sadness, and pathos while celebrating the power of ritual and untamed landscapes. Just as a larger home can be fashioned out of communally shared alleyways and courtyards, with passages enabling movement from one world to another, Green’s poems provide a similar doorway into a deeper understanding of ourselves.

A bracingly beautiful new collection from the author of Double Shadow "After the afterlife, there's an afterlife." In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely--not with judgment but with understanding--and extend that self more honestly toward others: It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway--why not in color?"

Will Schutt is the 2012 winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition A young soldier dons Napoleon’s hat. An out-of-work man wanders Berlin, dreaming he is Peter the Great. The famous exile Dante finally returns to his native city to “hang his crown of laurels up.” Familial and historical apparitions haunt this dazzling collection of poems by Will Schutt, the 2012 recipient of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets award. Coupled with Schutt’s own voice are the voices of some of Italy’s most prominent nineteenth- and twentieth-century poets including Giacomo Leopardi, Alda Merini, Eugenio Montale, and Edoardo Sanguineti. Subtle, discerning, restrained, the poems in Westerly probe a vast emotional geography, with its contingent pleasures and pains, “where the door’s always dark, the sky still blue.” . . . some narrow sickness buried you. Whatever boyhood I had fate hijacked too. Old friend, is this that world we stayed awake all night for? Truth dropped in. Far off, your cool hand points the way.

A stunning new collection of poems from the author of Speak Low Comparing any human life to a restless choir of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: now risk, and now / faintheartedness. In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there's only the questing forward--with no regrets and no looking back. Double Shadow is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for PoetryWinner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

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.

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."

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.

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.

Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent critical essays. He attends to the life and art of poetry by examining traditions across literary and cultural histories, from the restiveness of the Psalms, the pleas and persuasions of George Herbert, and the identity politics of the Black Arts Movement, to the Classically inflected restraint and release of his own poetry. Together, their elegantly wrought prose acclaim Carl Phillips as one of our most persuasive contemporary critics.

Wind as a face gone red with blowing, oceans whose end is broken stitchery-- swim of sea-dragon, dolphin, shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Knowthe 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. In Rock Harbor, 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.

Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill." As I understand it, I could" "call him. Though it would help, " "it is not required that I give him" "a name first. Also, nothing" "says he stops, then, or must turn." --from "The Figure, the Boundary, the Light"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 ts 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."

Carl Phillips is the author of nine previous books of poems, including "Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006";" Riding Westward"; and "The Rest of Love," a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Phillips here creates a shadowy inner landscape, one where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully yet often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us--believing in the possibility of light--seeks to penetrate. Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us--how to realize the self entirely, and in time--these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the formal backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry? Or when making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent and emotionally nuanced, "Pastoral" enlarges--and also defines--Phillips's already impressive poetic landscape. "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, are forms of wanting. His rhythms are beautifully and powerfully various--sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant--as he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; [this book] both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes."--Jorie Graham "In this brilliant fourth collection, foreboding fields and roaming creatures [both] echo the sorrow, alienation, and eros of bodily existence."--"Publishers Weekly" (starred review)

With From the Devotions, 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.

Since its founding at Northwestern University in 1964, TriQuarterly has remained one of the most widely admired and important literary magazines in the country. Under the editorial direction of Susan Firestone Hahn, TriQuarterly continues to publish the best work of both established and new poets and fiction writers. Laurence GoldsteinYusef KomunyakaaMarilyn HackerPeter Dale ScottCarl PhillipsMarcus CafagnaMary Yukari WatersA. A. SrinivasanDannie AbseMark RudmanIra SadoffEdward FalcoStephen DixonG. E. MurrayAnn TownsendPeter CooleyPaul BreslinCharles RaffertyRicardo Pau-LlosaJayanta MahapatraRachel LevineAmi Sands BrodoffPatricia LearWilliam LychackBob HicokRobert CordingFred DingsBeth Ann FennellyAlan Michael ParkerDaniel Halpern Tom WaymanTimothy LiuWislawa Szymborska--translations by Joanna Trzeciak and Marek LugowskiGabriel MotolaDavid Ferry