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Overview
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically admired poets
“What has restlessness been for?”
In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft” (Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review).
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780374717100 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 01/23/2018 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 80 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
COURTSHIP
— Both things, I think. But less the hesitation of many hands touching the stunned dethronement of the master's body, than their way of touching it again; again. Each time, more surely.
SWIMMING
Some nights, I rise from the latest excuse for
BROTHERS IN ARMS
The sea was one thing, once; the field another. Either way,
MEDITATION: ON BEING A MYSTERY TO ONESELF
The oars of the ship called Late Forgiveness lift,
MUSCULATURE
The last dog I owned, or — more humanely put, so I'm told — that I used to live with, she'd follow me everywhere. She died eventually. I put her down's more the truth. It is the truth. And now this dog — that I mostly call Sovereignty, both for how sovereignty,
GIVINGLY
— So here we are again, one-handedly fingering the puckered edges of the exit wounds memory leaves behind, he said, and he tossed his leash made of stars, then tightened it,
around the antlers it seems I forget, always,
that hide it. Surely any victim — sacrificial or not — deserves better, I thought, him leading me meanwhile toward the usual place, the branches grow more givingly apart there, as if to say
Let pass. The wind was clean. The wind was a good thing, in his hair, and across our faces.
THE DISTANCE AND THE SPOILS
Half a life; a life ... So much turns out to have been neither history nor memory, that mirage of history, in which I want you came at least briefly close. Sometimes disclosure's a pretty flower, and that's the end of it. Say he lifted himself slow, rose unsteadily up, sleep-or-
NOT THE WAVES AS THEY MAKE THEIR WAY FORWARD
Like Virgil, Marcus Aurelius died believing that his triumphs,
GOLD LEAF
To lift, without ever asking what animal exactly it once belonged to,
SEVERAL BIRDS IN HAND BUT THE REST GO FREE
Hiking the restored prairie was more than lovely enough —
STRAY
When he speaks of deserved and undeserved as more than terms — how they can matter, suddenly — I can tell he believes it. Sometimes a thing can seem star-like when it's just a star, stripped of whatever small form of joy likeness equals. Sometimes the thought that I'm doomed to fail — that the body is — keeps me almost steady, if steadiness is what a gift for a while brings — feathers, burst-
REVOLVER
His face was a festival. Inside it,
THE DARK NO SOFTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE
How I say it happened may not be how it happened. In that slum that the mind lately feels like, I'm walking as if forever toward where the chestnut trees flanking the brokenly lit boulevard — what's left of it — come now to a point, now to the never-to-be-reached conclusion I suspect they've meant all along. It's a slum, but the sea hugs it as it does so many places prettier, emptier of such distractions as fear and at least the more galvanizing varieties of sorrow, hence the not-so-muffled crashing of waves not far from here: blue dart,
FROM A BONFIRE
There's plenty I miss, still, that I wouldn't want back —
AND LOVE YOU TOO
When he describes a spear passing through the throat of some otherwise bronze-protected warrior, part of what Homer means is death, and there's a piece that isn't,
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Wild Is the Wind"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Carl Phillips.
Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Courtship,
Swimming,
Brothers in Arms,
Meditation: On Being a Mystery to Oneself,
Musculature,
Givingly,
The Distance and the Spoils,
Not the Waves as They Make Their Way Forward,
Gold Leaf,
Several Birds in Hand but the Rest Go Free,
Stray,
Revolver,
The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before,
From a Bonfire,
And Love You Too,
What I See Is the Light Falling All Around Us,
Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers,
If You Go Away,
What the Lost Are For,
Rockabye,
His Master's Voice,
That It Might Save, or Drown Them,
Gently, Though, Gentle,
The Wedding,
More Tenderly Over Some of Us Than Others,
The Way One Animal Trusts Another,
A Stillness Between the Hunting and the Chase,
Before the Leaves Turn Back,
For It Felt Like Power,
Craft and Vision,
Crossing,
Monomoy,
If You Will, I Will,
Wild Is the Wind,
The Sea, the Forest,
Notes and Acknowledgments,
Also by Carl Phillips,
A Note About the Author,
Copyright,