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Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
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 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.
224 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2007
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About the author
Carl Phillips
88 books203 followersCarl 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.
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.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
March 31, 2009
Reading his poems in The New Yorker, I have always been struck by their air of quiet intelligence. When I heard him read at last year's Sarah Lawrence Poetry Festival, I thought, here was the real thing. The authority of experience, thought and craft. The testing faith in language. The last three days of my spring break were spent reading his Selected Poems, Quiver of Arrows, and the experience was akin to falling in love.
The poems describe a rich interior landscape--love, grief, reason, violence--in syntax that grows increasingly baroque in the later books. The late style of Henry James comes to mind, especially when later poems refer to the need for "fine discriminations." The complex sentences are broken up, refracted, sounded, by the use of short lines, and so the versification produces an extremely private, meditative and yet dramatic voice, a voice that weighs its sound at every turn. In some poems these discriminations could be refined into airy nothings; they don't have the grounding of novelistic plot. But the best poems qualify heartbreak into knowledge.
Read straight through, the books also seem to develop a personal system of symbols. Besides the recurrent image of the bruise--and the magical return to unbruised flesh--other symbols like the horse and the arrow acquire complex meanings. The horse is, among many things, animal, sex, captain, the West. The phallic arrow points to the linearity of lives. The title of the collection comes from the great poem "As from a Quiver of Arrows," about the death of a friend. The poem's litany of questions enact the grief and angst of those left behind in a quiver.
Other favorite poems are "X," "Death of the Sibyl," "Alba: Innocence," "From the Devotions," "A Kind of Meadow," "The Gods Leaving," "The Kill," "The Point of the Lambs," "As a Blow, from the West," "Late Apollo," "White Dog," "Bright World," "Forecast," and "Break of Day." The religion in many of these poems is suffused with light while acknowledging the shadows. It listens for the bell, and the dying of the bell.
The poems describe a rich interior landscape--love, grief, reason, violence--in syntax that grows increasingly baroque in the later books. The late style of Henry James comes to mind, especially when later poems refer to the need for "fine discriminations." The complex sentences are broken up, refracted, sounded, by the use of short lines, and so the versification produces an extremely private, meditative and yet dramatic voice, a voice that weighs its sound at every turn. In some poems these discriminations could be refined into airy nothings; they don't have the grounding of novelistic plot. But the best poems qualify heartbreak into knowledge.
Read straight through, the books also seem to develop a personal system of symbols. Besides the recurrent image of the bruise--and the magical return to unbruised flesh--other symbols like the horse and the arrow acquire complex meanings. The horse is, among many things, animal, sex, captain, the West. The phallic arrow points to the linearity of lives. The title of the collection comes from the great poem "As from a Quiver of Arrows," about the death of a friend. The poem's litany of questions enact the grief and angst of those left behind in a quiver.
Other favorite poems are "X," "Death of the Sibyl," "Alba: Innocence," "From the Devotions," "A Kind of Meadow," "The Gods Leaving," "The Kill," "The Point of the Lambs," "As a Blow, from the West," "Late Apollo," "White Dog," "Bright World," "Forecast," and "Break of Day." The religion in many of these poems is suffused with light while acknowledging the shadows. It listens for the bell, and the dying of the bell.
October 14, 2009
Themes: transgression, body/soul split, sacred/profane, nature, perception, intimacy, human/animal, all explored by in almost trance-like voice. The way he uses syntax and lineation to reveal the shape of the poem's thinking, the way the syntax weaves down the page-- just breathtaking. So much of Stevens in here...I love Stevens, so I'm cool with that.
May 6, 2020
This collection just wasn’t for me. I’ve read other poems by Carl Phillips and have been absolutely wowed, but I had to trudge through this Selected. The curation is really smart; the poems fit like a unit. However, for me, the obsession of poems seem rooted in antiquity and ancient (Greek/Roman) themes. I prefer the poems of his that are contemporary meditations. Personal preference aside, one cannot deny his lyricism.
“In the dream, the world // was birdless, lit, yielding”
(As a Blow, from The West).
“Hazel trees; / ghost-moths in the hazel branches”
(Singing).
“After which,/ I held him/ until his body was not // his body,
/ was a single birch / I’d seen years ago—// down and silvering,/ in a field, // Indiana.”
(Fervor).
“In the dream, the world // was birdless, lit, yielding”
(As a Blow, from The West).
“Hazel trees; / ghost-moths in the hazel branches”
(Singing).
“After which,/ I held him/ until his body was not // his body,
/ was a single birch / I’d seen years ago—// down and silvering,/ in a field, // Indiana.”
(Fervor).
October 23, 2022
i know i'll be thinking back on this collection for a long time... just wow
September 1, 2023
As a faggot I love Carl. And while this is young work, I do sometimes feel he gets trapped in his own style. Bondage, in this way, usually ends in a loosening.
April 12, 2015
madly in love with the density of phillips' language and the vocabulary and symbolism he builds into his own lush nest. so much inspiration here.
November 22, 2010
I thought the earlier poems brilliant - connected fully. Reading many of the later works, I found my mind wandering away from the wandering language then snapping back for the often powerful ending.
May 26, 2023
I really don't understand why Carl Phillips is not better known. Based on this collection, he is one of the greatest poets of the last century. Wonderful stuff.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews