Rock Harbor
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poets
Wind as a face gone red with blowing,
oceans whose end is broken stitchery--
swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,
shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Know
the kind of map I mean. Countries as
distant as they are believable . . .
--from "Halo"
Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.
Here, in his sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Lingering at the junctures of desire and attainment, Phillips's sixth collection demonstrates how the largest questions of ethics and responsibility play out, or perhaps disappear, in the smallest moments of intimate relationships, and find death as their limit. The extremely attenuated lines of last year's The Tether have filled out here, but Phillips' trademark phrasal difficulty and oblique half-metaphors remain as beautiful and perplexing as ever, as in the following staggered simile cum Yeatsian inquiry: "Like so many/ birds that, given the chance/ not to fly for once in// formation, won't take it, or / cannot, or or but/ what kind of choice can a bird know?" This collection features fewer hawks, stags and hounds; the classical imagery remains but has been tempered to a more fanciful and personalized vocabulary. Most interested in the pause between doing and having done, between saying or writing and the moment after, Philips writes poems as prayers, his speaker praying that his words will bear some effect. At the edge of his mind, the poet knows "right and wrong take in/ each other no apparent/ interest," but he retains his belief in redemption if only momentarily attained through conversation or sex: "the two of us regarding// equally but differently/ the sea." Erotic prayers and tortured love poems, mythic games and devotional memory, are twinned in this liminal universe, balanced upon "the body folding, and/ unfolding as if/ map, then shroud."
