Quiver Of Arrows : Selected Poems 1986-2006

Imagine Emily Dickinson as a gay male poet in late 20th/early 21st century America and you'll have some sense of Carl Phillips' poems. Add to this image Dante's dictum (from the Vita Nuova) that the poet should make manifest the "intelligence of love", and the picture sharpens. At every carefully negotiated turn Phillips matches (and modulates) emotional with intellectual passion, giving the impression of mind and heart together picking their way across a perilous erotic landscape. That this constitutes a map of sexual desire upon which the possibility of reproduction does not appear futher complicates and enriches the terrain. In Carl Phillips' poems the great twin strands of the American poetic tradition meet: the afore-mentioned Muse of Amherst and the great grey father Whitman.

Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips’s work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America’s most distinctive—and one of poetry’s most essential—contemporary voices. Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

 

Phillips’s sensibility as he questions morality, psychology, and our notions of responsibility is as startlingly original as the poems themselves, whose exacting standards for the line’s flexibility and whose argument for a versatile, more muscular syntax bring to American poetry “something not unlike a new musical scale” (The Miami Herald). Quiver of Arrows is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

Praise for Carl Phillips:

 

"Singing the music of mythology, history and philosophy, [Phillips's] poems are delicately crafted to sound like common speech even though there is nothing pedestrian about them. Because of their dexterity, they are approachable without sacrificing their loftier aspirations." --Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald

 

Praise for Riding Westward:

 

“The poems in Riding Westward ring like peals of a bell—recognizable, separate and yet merging together, radiating from a single source . . . Again Phillips strikes the theme of radiating realities, this time working inward from the largest darkness of all, which is implied, to the darkness of night, to the smaller darkness of one person’s remembered life. The cowboy’s song—as all the poems in Riding Westward—is a comforting lament.” –Aaron Belz, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
 
“This is a tidal collection with poems that are wavelike in their formation, breaking and falling abruptly or gently rinsing the shore, all in a dance of creation and erasure . . . Riding Westward offers an expansion of mind that can only be compared to riding out into the boundary-less field of vision our Western plains offer.” –Janet St. John, Booklist

 

Carl Phillips is the author of eight previous books of poems, including The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist; Rock Harbor; and The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Imprint: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Distributor: MPS
Publication Date: 05-01-2007
Pages: 224
Measurements: 9.00in X 6.00in