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.
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. 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 mediation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct. Table of Contents"""" "Erasure
Bright World
Torn Sash
Falling
Sea Glass
The Way Back
Radiance versus Ordinary Light
The Smell of Hay
Ocean
Brocade
Stardust
The Lower Marshes
Island
Affliction
Bow Down
A Summer
Swear-to-God
After
To a Legend
Close Your Eyes
Shall Want for Nothing
In Waves
Plumage
The Messenger
Turning West
Chivalry
Truce
Lost, but for a Few Still-Bright Details
Forecast
The Cure
Native
Deepest, Where the Water Looks More Green
Translation
Break of the Day
Armed, Luminous
Riding Westward"
Acknowledgements "Short sentences mixed with long, arresting confessions mixed with hard explanations, make parts of the love poems and antilove poems as memorable as ever. Phillips's command of syntax, while changing favored forms, remains, as does his acquaintance with the knots and contradictions of desire: 'Trust me, ' one poem asks, 'the way one animal trusts another.'"--"Publishers Weekly" "Phillip's eighth collection continues his focus on eros. In this volume, sex is figured as 'pillaging, ' desire as the longing to be 'punished' and 'crushed.' The poems are charged with this liminal eroticism, made hotter by suggestive ambiguities--unfixed images, lost referents, passing detail echoed nowhere else: 'the slightest act, his removing the cross from / around his neck before fucking a stranger, a grace almost--" (from 'Ocean'). These poems lure readers to transgressive places in the imagination. But there is no judgment here--rather there is release from judgment, a repeated insistence that 'moral landscapes' are not useful. 'The body is not an allegory--" Phillips writes in 'Sea Glass, ' 'it / can't help that it looks like one.' This poetry empowers us to explore much that our society deems transgressive, dangerous, and frightening. The book's title, understood as a movement toward death, is reflected most strikingly in 'Bow Down, ' about the loss of an intimate. But the movement west is also toward freedom, empowerment. In the title poem, Phillips marries these metaphorical movements to the figure of the cowboy, who rejects civilization and its mores to explore a frontier, whether of land or of body. Phillips's cowboys-singer watches his word fly: 'falling, settling into / . . . that larger darkness, where the smaller / darkness that our lives were lie softy down.' The empowering lyric rides forward with us, but the destination is finally sunset. Phillips poems offer few concrete ledges--few places for a reader to pause, certain about setting or action. With their refusal of narrative and unpredictable associations of thought and image--their lyric logic--the poems alternately reveal and withhold, and then beckon toward their secrets. But for careful, receptive readers, "Riding Westward" offers great sensuality and a serious moral interrogation."--Benjamin S. Grossberg, "The Antioch Review
""Carl Phillips has long written poems that ignore contemporary American aesthetic doctrines, and that fact alone is heartening. He is entirely comfortable with abstraction, often building his poems on lofty language, and he is unafraid to 'tell' as much as he 'shows.' His poems speak in the tone of one speaking to an intimate about shared experience, without the kind of sarcasm we often call irony . . . What is more, the reader is seldom sure where or when the situation described by one of Phillips's poems is occurring. Because of these qualities, the poems in Phillips's latest collection, "Riding Westward," may at first confound readers who are used to so-called 'accessible' poetry. In fact, accessibility is one of those contemporary doctrines I mentioned above--on which Phillips thankfully ignores . . . While reading this collection, one often finds oneself unconsciously repositioning oneself imaginatively in order to create, along with the poem, the story to which the poem alludes. The fact that this is effective is a testimony to the power of this collection--it is not something a lesser poet could achieve . . . One way to describe Phillips's poems is to acknowledge that they function more evocatively than descriptively. What I mean is that they are not by any means "about" life, which would be no accomplishment at all; rather, they are "of" life, out of it, and convincingly so, which is a great
