From the Devotions

by Carl Phillips

From the Devotions by Carl Phillips. Graywolf Press,1998

Genres: Poetry, African American, Literature, Gay

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1998

About the author

Carl Phillips is the highly acclaimed author of 10 collections of poetry.

He was born in 1959 to an Air Force family, who moved regularly throughout his childhood, until finally settling in his high-school years at Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and Boston University and taught high-school Latin for eight years.

His first book, In the Blood, won the 1992 Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and was heralded as the work of an outstanding newcomer in the field of contemporary poetry. His other books are Cortège (1995), a finalist for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Lambda Literary Award in Poetry; From the Devotions (1998), a finalist for the National Book Award in poetry; Pastoral (2000), winner of the Lambda Literary Award; The Tether, (2001), winner of the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; Rock Harbor (2002); The Rest of Love: Poems, a 2004 National Book Award finalist, for which Phillips also won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry; Riding Westward (2006); Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 (2007); and Speak Low (2009), a 2009 National Book Award finalist. Two additional titles were published in the 2003-04 academic year: a translation of Sophocles' Philoctetes came out in September 2003, and a book of essays, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, was published in May 2004. Phillips is the recipient of, among others, a literature award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Witter Bynner Foundation Fellowship from the Library of Congress, the Academy of American Poets Fellowship, two Pushcart Prizes, and the Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems, essays, and translations have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The Yale Review, as well as in anthologies, including eight times in the Best American Poetry series, The Best of the Best American Poetry 1988-1997, and The New Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Poets. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2004 and elected a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets in 2006. He is a Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program.

Reviews

[Peter Kerry Powers · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have an inscribed copy of this book from 1999 that I am not quite sure how I came by. It acknowledges my 40th birthday and I suspect it may have been a gift from my friend Julia Kasdorf, who would be the only person I would have known that knows Carl Phillips, and I don't think he found his way to Messiah, but perhaps he did and I've forgotten. In the way of all things, I did not manage to get around to reading until this past week. Perhaps books find their way to us when we are ready for them since I found it strangely moving, in a way that was both visceral and intellectual, the difficult syntax requiring steady and deep attention, its fractures and obsessive repetitions seeming in some ways to reflect the obsessive characteristics of mourning, which is finally what the book is about, the palpable sense of loss that pervades the book provoking my own emotions. I also recently read Christian Wiman's Every Riven Thing, and I will have to say, though comparison is odious, that Phillips book did more for me. Death has a nature not for the dead but for the living, and we experience that most intensely and profoundly in mourning, an emotion--inadequate word--that in Wiman's work I keep feeling pushed aside or in to abstraction.


Perhaps inevitably my favorite poem is about the effort, finally fruitless, to have words and poetry as an adequate guideline through the caverns of unexpected loss:


"The truest words are something else at any
given moment can happen, will, has happened.
I could say that at the window of my house I


"looked out through my lattice, and I perceived
among the youths a young man spitting proverbs
like 'You can lead, if it is thirsty, any horse
to the water,' and that would be but one version.


"Another is: Unable to forget, I sought out every
space that I thought might contain you. Each
one I entered. At each I called Come, or Where
now Little Shield, or Little Sir Refuge, here?"

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Phillip's style and syntax in this collection. I can see the metaphycial poets affect on him through the use of dualities, ideas of spirituality and the sublime and the packed verses that connect and flow into eachother so well. This collection is very well crafted. There were a few poems I didn't like because of the sometimes subtle, sometimes overbearing sexuality in them, but I still enjoyed his ear for language. There were two sonnets that stood out for me because many contemporary poets refuse to write in the structure any more. He did an amazing job in keeping to the structure, yet maintaining his voice and keeping his thoughts clear. I hope his other poetry collections are as satisfying.

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

To settle on the conventional treatment of the body/soul duality would be too simple for Phillips. And so he broadens the argument separating these two, bringing into question (I think) where the body's impulses are authored if they're not from the soul. Why not use an image of a tree (as in "Alba: Failure"), and the complicated personification we put on a tree, to illustrate that a life is full of animation that cannot be accounted for.

[Acolyte · Rating 5 out of 5]

if you are serious, than be.

[Amelia · Rating 5 out of 5]

"The trees // wave but, except to say "wind— / up again," this / means nothing." "The Trees"

"They are not kings, they are trees, I know this, / and if they bend it is wind only, it is nature, / isn't it also indifference?" "Alba: Failure"

"At the window brush / fail, brush / fail go the leaves." "The Tunnel"

on hands: "and they not sad, apparently, / and not particularly waving. And just the wind for a sound: / cold, hollow. Us calling it song or saying No, it is grace." "Meditation:"

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the Alba poems. I appreciate some of the more formal moments. But these poems do not speak to me. Too lofty, by which I mean vague and devotional, for me.

[Mills College Library]

811.6 P5584f 1998

[Sarah Sammis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry is one type of literature that I feel like I don't understand. Poetry remains one of the great big mysteries. I have tried my hand at writing different forms of poetry and have tried reading different kinds of it. But it's not something I feel like I have a grasp on.

I have a friend who loves poetry. He reads through anthologies like I read through graphic novels. He's also my main source of poetry reading. The most recent book I borrowed from him is From the Devotions by Carl Philips.

The collection mixes religious imagery and mythology with explorations of the human condition. The poems are beautiful and emotionally charged. Many of them I read more than once.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stunning in tone, each of Phillips' poems carry the weight of emotional baggage, revealing the harm we inflict on one another merely with words.

[Scott Rankin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you just want to read about desire even if it's often sad.