Riding Westward
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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.
The singer turning this and that way, as if watching the song itself
--the words to the song--leave him, as he
lets each go, the wind carrying most of it,
some of the words, falling, settling into
instead that larger darkness, where the smaller
darknesses that our lives were lie softly down."
--from "Riding Westward"
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? What is the difference, Phillips 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The prolific, always articulate Phillips attained late-'90s acclaim for a series of books (among them Pastoral and From the Devotions) whose intricate clauses and mythic topics followed the passions and trials of physical embodiment and erotic (especially same-sex) love. In recent years, he has sought clearer, more various styles in which to take on the same concerns: never more than in this eighth collection, which proposes "cruelty as a means of understanding... love's conditions not clear,/ but clearer," and wants us to admit, "that's/ how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine." 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."
