A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically acclaimed poets. Carl Phillips's new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various...

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...

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...

Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill. "Like something broken of wing, lying there. Other than breathing's rise, catch, release, a silence, as of some especially wounded animal that, nevertheless, still is conscious, you can see straight through the open eye to where instinct falters because for once it has come divided" -from "Chamber Music" In the art of falconry, during training the tether between...

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...