The Tether
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 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 its 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With his signature clausal intricacies and forbiddingly terse tercets intact, Phillips makes the jump after four books with Graywolf to FSG. Yet where books like Cort ge (1995) and From the Devotions (1998) were fraught attempts finding a language to control highly charged, even mortally erotic circumstance, last year's Pastoral, while still saturated with difficult longing, hinted at the possibility of d tente. The grudging pleasures and negotiations of leashed life are the main subjects of this fifth collection, which looks back to previous work and, for the first time, forward to the beloved's continued presence: "There was, one time, a stag / And now there isn't,// is there?/ And no, he won't come,/ ever, back. This is the widening, but// not unbeautiful wake of his having/ left us." While the hunt, a recurrent Phillips motif, continues here, and "carnage's/ bright details" (i.e., cheating) are suitably hung up, they are more instinctual relapse than planned pursuit, and are dealt with accordingly. The book's last poem, "Revision," shifts from intentionally unstable tercets to firmly decisive couplets, mirroring the speaker's aware-of-the-stakes commitment: "I recognize you / and the recognizing has the effect of/ slowing down that// part of me that would/ walk past, or as if away toward// another ending You/ speak first. And I'll answer."