What do you think?
Rate this book
Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically acclaimed poets.
Carl Phillips's new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self's multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips's most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
Carl Phillips's new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self's multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips's most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
58 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2020
26 people are currently reading
525 people want to read
About the author
Carl Phillips
88 books206 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews
June 17, 2023
Stunning 💖
December 14, 2021
4.5-5 stars
perhaps too “inaccesible” for the 1-star reviewers but i personally love putting in the work that some poets demand—be as serious as a consumer of art as the artist. don’t read a poem and move on when it doesn’t immediately ~reveal~ itself to you! read it again and ruminate! i personally prefer when a poet trusts a reader to be patient and diligent rather than one who tries to spell everything out for us. i glided through these spellbound by their language and rhythm. then i read them again to uncover more of their contents (though i think their thematic trail was fairly easy to follow). maybe my favorite collection i’ve read this year <3
perhaps too “inaccesible” for the 1-star reviewers but i personally love putting in the work that some poets demand—be as serious as a consumer of art as the artist. don’t read a poem and move on when it doesn’t immediately ~reveal~ itself to you! read it again and ruminate! i personally prefer when a poet trusts a reader to be patient and diligent rather than one who tries to spell everything out for us. i glided through these spellbound by their language and rhythm. then i read them again to uncover more of their contents (though i think their thematic trail was fairly easy to follow). maybe my favorite collection i’ve read this year <3
March 17, 2021
What a poet! The sounds and the words are put together like no one else. A conversation, an intricate thought, a blessing to go on with life. Listening to them being read by Carl Phillips is the best.
June 25, 2021
I discovered several favorites - 'Defiance', 'Morphine' and definitely 'Skylark'.
October 19, 2022
Don’t think I’ve ever cried so hard after finishing a poetry collection and not known the reason why
June 12, 2024
Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed
for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like
beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'm
thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering
unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got
torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten,
not that some things aren't maybe best forgotten, at a
certain point at least, I've reached that point in my own life
where there's so much I'd rather not remember, that
to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough,
some days, that there's memory at all, though that's not
exactly it, it's more what gets remembered, how we
don't get to choose. For example, if love used to mean
rescue, now it's more gladiatorial, though in the end
more clean: Who said that? Not the one whose face I've
described somewhere as the sun at that moment when,
as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night's
shadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No.
Not that one. And not the one whose specialty was
making a bad habit sound more excusable by calling it
ritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for it
hard enough, you can always find some deeper form
of sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—mere
sorrow lay ... I'd been arguing the difference between
the soul being cast out and the soul departing, so I
still believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.
Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freed
for good—not for the freedom of it, or anything like
beauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'm
thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering
unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got
torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten,
not that some things aren't maybe best forgotten, at a
certain point at least, I've reached that point in my own life
where there's so much I'd rather not remember, that
to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough,
some days, that there's memory at all, though that's not
exactly it, it's more what gets remembered, how we
don't get to choose. For example, if love used to mean
rescue, now it's more gladiatorial, though in the end
more clean: Who said that? Not the one whose face I've
described somewhere as the sun at that moment when,
as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night's
shadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No.
Not that one. And not the one whose specialty was
making a bad habit sound more excusable by calling it
ritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for it
hard enough, you can always find some deeper form
of sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—mere
sorrow lay ... I'd been arguing the difference between
the soul being cast out and the soul departing, so I
still believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.
October 21, 2020
I picked this up as an audiobook while looking for something easy to listen to while battling a spat of anxiety. To be honest, I probably didn't catch the meaning of most of his poems, but the melodious lines and images of nature soaked into and massaged my mind. The audiobook is narrated by the author himself, and he has a clear and calm voice. I will definitely be listening to this collection again in the future.
June 4, 2021
All these pieces in this collection feel adrift, and without anchor. The narrative voice vacillates between tense and idea, imagery and concept without sticking to any one thing long enough for them to mean anything.
These all feel like journal entries not meant for anyone but the writer to understand (hidden messages wrapped up in dense language and metaphor). There are not enough clues for the reader to follow the through lines that the poet might have wanted to convey.
There is no obligation for the writer to 'dumb' anything down for the reader, but accessibility makes a huge difference. Maybe I missed the point too, maybe it's supposed to be aloof and academic and artsy and fartsy.
Poetry is as much about the sound and feel of language as it is in the content and story being told. This book rests heavily on the former.
These all feel like journal entries not meant for anyone but the writer to understand (hidden messages wrapped up in dense language and metaphor). There are not enough clues for the reader to follow the through lines that the poet might have wanted to convey.
There is no obligation for the writer to 'dumb' anything down for the reader, but accessibility makes a huge difference. Maybe I missed the point too, maybe it's supposed to be aloof and academic and artsy and fartsy.
Poetry is as much about the sound and feel of language as it is in the content and story being told. This book rests heavily on the former.
February 27, 2024
First poetry Ive read in a long time, and I really enjoyed it. Thanks to @Renee for gifting to me!
These poems were sad, dealing with loneliness and regret, but from a position of almost detatched reflection. It seemed as if Phillips was looking back on his life as one looks at a sunset or watches a movie or listens to a sad song.
The best of them really got under my skin and made me feel a lot of things. To be honest the reading process was far more labor intensive than I had expected. Im used to reading novels in big chunks and relaxing while doing so, but every session of reading this book I had to approach with focus and a pen.
Something I really enjoyed about this collection was its progression/ordering. Themes, images, ideas were subtley introduced in the early poems which only fully developed about 2/3 of the way through the collection. It was very satisfying to feel as if I had joined Phillips on a train of thought or the growth of an idea over time.
My favorite poems were the ones which easily integrated feelings and imagery, especially natural imagery. "To enter a room is to know at once how it not so long ago contained fear. To understand hesitation both ways: as a form of worry and as a sign for it. Through the room's lonely window: it's that ragged end to the season when to find the sycamore means watching for the barks tendency towards scab."(Said the Horse to the Light)
The ones I enjoyed less were those that felt self indulgent in sorrow and wordplay to a degree that became self-referential and felt somewhat pointless. The abstract needs the concrete and vise-versa.
I will be reading more poetry in the future!!
These poems were sad, dealing with loneliness and regret, but from a position of almost detatched reflection. It seemed as if Phillips was looking back on his life as one looks at a sunset or watches a movie or listens to a sad song.
The best of them really got under my skin and made me feel a lot of things. To be honest the reading process was far more labor intensive than I had expected. Im used to reading novels in big chunks and relaxing while doing so, but every session of reading this book I had to approach with focus and a pen.
Something I really enjoyed about this collection was its progression/ordering. Themes, images, ideas were subtley introduced in the early poems which only fully developed about 2/3 of the way through the collection. It was very satisfying to feel as if I had joined Phillips on a train of thought or the growth of an idea over time.
My favorite poems were the ones which easily integrated feelings and imagery, especially natural imagery. "To enter a room is to know at once how it not so long ago contained fear. To understand hesitation both ways: as a form of worry and as a sign for it. Through the room's lonely window: it's that ragged end to the season when to find the sycamore means watching for the barks tendency towards scab."(Said the Horse to the Light)
The ones I enjoyed less were those that felt self indulgent in sorrow and wordplay to a degree that became self-referential and felt somewhat pointless. The abstract needs the concrete and vise-versa.
I will be reading more poetry in the future!!
April 13, 2020
Some—the luckiest—
arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where
to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,
or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl
before them, one after the other, each a seemingly
vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about,
not anymore, they agreed
it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was
was their own.
--from "On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching," by Carl Phillips
I finally got my copy of *Pale Colors in a Tall Field* and promptly devoured it. So reflective and wise, these poems made me understand parts of my humanity--my shame, my memories joyful and somber, my most important relationships, including the one with myself--in new ways. They made me think on this, for many, holy day that the "vast underworld of damage" we carry shouldn't have to be a stumbling block for personal growth or for giving and receiving love.
Gorgeous collection.
arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where
to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,
or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl
before them, one after the other, each a seemingly
vast underworld of damage they didn’t have to talk about,
not anymore, they agreed
it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was
was their own.
--from "On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching," by Carl Phillips
I finally got my copy of *Pale Colors in a Tall Field* and promptly devoured it. So reflective and wise, these poems made me understand parts of my humanity--my shame, my memories joyful and somber, my most important relationships, including the one with myself--in new ways. They made me think on this, for many, holy day that the "vast underworld of damage" we carry shouldn't have to be a stumbling block for personal growth or for giving and receiving love.
Gorgeous collection.
July 26, 2022
CADENCE
To be honest, the crowd frightened me at first:
the size, but also how some had—for mouths—just holes
at the back of which, only half discernible,
so that I’d think I’d seen a thing and have to look again,
lay a faint glow, like the last
embers of a fire once believed
untamable …
More often than not, mystery rules out
familiarity; that doesn’t mean it has to. Just so: one of them,
slowing down, stopping, laid his hand on my chest. How fair a hand
it was, despite signs all over it
of a life spent working hard in the open air. One of his eyes
spoke despair, the other brimmed with that unmistakable color
of a jetty’s rocks at waterline after
so many years of waves crashing over and against them: not green-to-black,
the rocks, not black entirely, not apology, not
quite rescue. I pulled his hand away, gently—
gently enough, I think—and let what should keep falling.
To be honest, the crowd frightened me at first:
the size, but also how some had—for mouths—just holes
at the back of which, only half discernible,
so that I’d think I’d seen a thing and have to look again,
lay a faint glow, like the last
embers of a fire once believed
untamable …
More often than not, mystery rules out
familiarity; that doesn’t mean it has to. Just so: one of them,
slowing down, stopping, laid his hand on my chest. How fair a hand
it was, despite signs all over it
of a life spent working hard in the open air. One of his eyes
spoke despair, the other brimmed with that unmistakable color
of a jetty’s rocks at waterline after
so many years of waves crashing over and against them: not green-to-black,
the rocks, not black entirely, not apology, not
quite rescue. I pulled his hand away, gently—
gently enough, I think—and let what should keep falling.
October 31, 2023
"; bells, and then--
from the smudged edge of all that
seemed to be left of what we'd called
belief, once, bodies, not of hunting-birds, what we'd
thought at first, but human bodies in flight,
in flight and lit from within as if
by ruin, or triumph, maybe, at having
made out of ruin a light, something
useful by which, having skimmed the water, to search
the meadow now, for ourselves inside it where, yes, though we
shook in our nakedness, we lay
naked as we'd been taught to do: when afraid,
what is faith, but to make a gift of yourself --"
---
a little re-read before lending this. carl phillips knows how to make you work to read a sentence & what absolute sentences he makes - they meander & wander & double back on themselves. makes for really fun poems to read aloud; the motion, the descent, the breaths & where to take them. "A Little Closer Though, If You Can, for What Got Lost Here" was the reason i picked up the collection & is still a favorite.
from the smudged edge of all that
seemed to be left of what we'd called
belief, once, bodies, not of hunting-birds, what we'd
thought at first, but human bodies in flight,
in flight and lit from within as if
by ruin, or triumph, maybe, at having
made out of ruin a light, something
useful by which, having skimmed the water, to search
the meadow now, for ourselves inside it where, yes, though we
shook in our nakedness, we lay
naked as we'd been taught to do: when afraid,
what is faith, but to make a gift of yourself --"
---
a little re-read before lending this. carl phillips knows how to make you work to read a sentence & what absolute sentences he makes - they meander & wander & double back on themselves. makes for really fun poems to read aloud; the motion, the descent, the breaths & where to take them. "A Little Closer Though, If You Can, for What Got Lost Here" was the reason i picked up the collection & is still a favorite.
March 25, 2022
It's that time of year when I try reading poetry again!
No real update for 2022 because I still don't get it. This collection especially. The poems are formatted in a way that looks like they've been randomly sliced in the middle of a sentence, which is something I generally dislike in poetry. I finished this book about two minutes ago and I've basically forgotten it already. It's barely even worth adding to my Goodreads list but since it counts forwards my Reading Challenge, here we are.
I've read a few reviews for this book and some people really seem to enjoy it, which I cannot understand but good for them, I guess?
Also, so many poems about horses. Weird.
No real update for 2022 because I still don't get it. This collection especially. The poems are formatted in a way that looks like they've been randomly sliced in the middle of a sentence, which is something I generally dislike in poetry. I finished this book about two minutes ago and I've basically forgotten it already. It's barely even worth adding to my Goodreads list but since it counts forwards my Reading Challenge, here we are.
I've read a few reviews for this book and some people really seem to enjoy it, which I cannot understand but good for them, I guess?
Also, so many poems about horses. Weird.
December 1, 2021
I've been writing a lot of poetry lately and Carl Phillips work is incredibly inspiring. His use of phonetics and punctuation and just his manipulation of syntax is absolutely beautiful. The poems are mystifying with a strong sense of urgency to remember our pasts and contemplate our future. This collection came to me at a good time.
April 10, 2023
Beautiful, sometimes painfully sad, once so much so that I exclaimed after finishing the poem.
August 7, 2023
i have learned i don’t like poetry
November 10, 2023
labyrinthine and animalistic and strange and lovely
September 20, 2024
One of the best I've read.
August 12, 2023
The face in sleep, like a wish wasted...
April 14, 2020
Phillips is a poet of long discursive lines and an ability to describe the human predicament in philosophical and interesting associations, often to do with nature and landscapes - particularly here, horses, bees, and the sea. In the title poem of this new collection he associates the problem of memory, what we remember that we wouldn't if we got to choose what we remember, with horses long tamed being freed and unexpectedly re-entering a past state of being, suggesting there's a kind of violence to it. "There's so much I'd rather not remember, that to be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost" is a sentiment most readers can likely identify with - the memories bringing back what was lost, what could have been, but wasn't.
On a first reading my favorite of these poems is "On Being Asked To Be More Specific When It Comes To Longing", a poem about either love or existential meaning, maybe both. In the poem, the speaker comes into a meadow of silverrod plants, "each stem briefly an angled argument against despair, then only weeds by a better name again", and stumbles through the twilight, his actions "like taking a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might more easily disperse", until finally he comes to a sort of revelation "from the smudged edge of all that seemed to be left of what we'd called belief, once", seeing the human body "made out of a ruin a light" used to both find ourselves and each other, for "when afraid, what is faith, but to make a gift of yourself - give; and you shall receive", he concludes, quoting from the gospel of Luke.
But there's so much more; a Phillips collection always rewards continuous returns, letting the waves wash over and break, and recede, and wash over and break, and recede... a rhythmical pattern within that is deeply true.
On a first reading my favorite of these poems is "On Being Asked To Be More Specific When It Comes To Longing", a poem about either love or existential meaning, maybe both. In the poem, the speaker comes into a meadow of silverrod plants, "each stem briefly an angled argument against despair, then only weeds by a better name again", and stumbles through the twilight, his actions "like taking a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might more easily disperse", until finally he comes to a sort of revelation "from the smudged edge of all that seemed to be left of what we'd called belief, once", seeing the human body "made out of a ruin a light" used to both find ourselves and each other, for "when afraid, what is faith, but to make a gift of yourself - give; and you shall receive", he concludes, quoting from the gospel of Luke.
But there's so much more; a Phillips collection always rewards continuous returns, letting the waves wash over and break, and recede, and wash over and break, and recede... a rhythmical pattern within that is deeply true.
June 25, 2020
The best collection of Phillip’s long and distinguished career. These poems are a skillful mix of action and contemplation that artfully describe the immediate sensations of feeling while looking back in honesty if whether those first impressions/descriptions/feelings held true and withstood the test of time. Although elegiac, there is a resoluteness to these poems that suggest that he will continue to be “the cigarette casually let go of at the field’s center; (and) the field on fire.” Some of the best poems here remind me of the artistry in Jack Gilbert’s “The Great Fires,” in that in just a few lines he can perfectly capture what other poets or novelists can’t, or need much more space to do so. Here is the entire poem of “Overheard, Under A Dark Enchantment,”:
“Compassion first, we were told-and if that won’t work,
compassion’s shadow, pity, to smooth what’s rough.
We find
just holding the victim’s hand, lately, has been exactly
enough.”
The tendency to read this poem in a compassionate way would be that the person who is giving “pity” is doing just enough to console the victim, but in light of “Black Lives Matter,” or the “Me Too Movement,” what happens if we refuse to allow the rough edges to be “smoothed “ and forsake the cheap, derogatory feelings of pity instead and call for a reckoning to confront why there are repeated victims in the first place. A masterful collection.
“Compassion first, we were told-and if that won’t work,
compassion’s shadow, pity, to smooth what’s rough.
We find
just holding the victim’s hand, lately, has been exactly
enough.”
The tendency to read this poem in a compassionate way would be that the person who is giving “pity” is doing just enough to console the victim, but in light of “Black Lives Matter,” or the “Me Too Movement,” what happens if we refuse to allow the rough edges to be “smoothed “ and forsake the cheap, derogatory feelings of pity instead and call for a reckoning to confront why there are repeated victims in the first place. A masterful collection.
April 13, 2022
I saw this collection of poems on a display table for national poetry month. It was labeled as queer and I was intrigued by the author’s take on memory being made up of various colors.
Once I began I realized I would need to devote time reading this collection and would need support. I YouTube’d some talks with Carl Phillips and heard him read a few of his poems. I was a bit sad that he did not expand much on the poems, not offering some context to help his readers navigate through his collection.
At the end, I found his collection to be a bit inaccessible. I did enjoy some of the language, the imagery of nature and colors. Perhaps I will revisit in the future and see if I gain some more insight/meaning I didn't catch this first time around.
Watching several YouTube talks with the writer I found the following to be interesting:
Each poem has a different POV, sometimes a different POV within the same poem. This has the effect of seeming to look at an experience from many different angles. Sort of like a multifaceted jewel, when you turn it, light catches a different facet. Not everything gets caught by the light.
Once I began I realized I would need to devote time reading this collection and would need support. I YouTube’d some talks with Carl Phillips and heard him read a few of his poems. I was a bit sad that he did not expand much on the poems, not offering some context to help his readers navigate through his collection.
At the end, I found his collection to be a bit inaccessible. I did enjoy some of the language, the imagery of nature and colors. Perhaps I will revisit in the future and see if I gain some more insight/meaning I didn't catch this first time around.
Watching several YouTube talks with the writer I found the following to be interesting:
Each poem has a different POV, sometimes a different POV within the same poem. This has the effect of seeming to look at an experience from many different angles. Sort of like a multifaceted jewel, when you turn it, light catches a different facet. Not everything gets caught by the light.
January 21, 2021
A gorgeous collection. Blurb on the back rightfully compares Phillips's work in this book to Emily Dickinson; his mastery of abstraction, syntax, and punctuation all attest to that claim. The poems' sense of interiority, their exploration of a highly reflective mind anchored to the necessarily contrasting physical body further flesh out this comparison. The abstract-ness and the divergent construction of the syntax can make the poems feel less accessible if you're looking for linear narrative--but the meditations on memory, and how it is both constructed and not, felt clear and relevant to me. A new favorite.
August 13, 2021
One of the joys of reading poetry, and books for that matter, is to discover someone new, at least to me. This is the first collection by Phillips that I have read, and will not be my last.
Like any good poet, his work makes you think, reflect, and look inward at one's own life. These are poems meant to be savored and read over and over.
Phillips is not afraid to bare his soul and his use of imagery is outstanding. A good example is the line "if birch, then the bark unfurling, less/like a ship's sails than like the worn-to-parchment-thin stages/of a landfall won barely"?
I give this one five stars and recommend to any lover of good poetry.
Like any good poet, his work makes you think, reflect, and look inward at one's own life. These are poems meant to be savored and read over and over.
Phillips is not afraid to bare his soul and his use of imagery is outstanding. A good example is the line "if birch, then the bark unfurling, less/like a ship's sails than like the worn-to-parchment-thin stages/of a landfall won barely"?
I give this one five stars and recommend to any lover of good poetry.
April 8, 2020
maybe poetry of this style not a thing for me
July 27, 2021
This book has been described as a "meditation," which I think is honest, but I thought it was also somewhat obscure and dense, difficult for me to absorb and understand.
August 10, 2023
Instructions Prior
The tickseed thriving in banks like clouds beneath us
The idea of a wind
The clean commitment every instinct comes down to in the hawk descending
Actual wind, waves as waves
The idea of a body
Waves as merely interruptions for once across the lake's flat surface
Only what you yourself mean to it, yes
Your idea of the world
The body as a shield keeping slightly at bay what it also reflects
Everything you've lived for
Its raised wings machete-ing the space between want and having
For hours, I lay beside him in the pear tree's shadow, watching him sleep (11-2)
Snow
Or am I not
still the victor, who knows to look but once upon his conquests,
then away, lest he seem vulnerable, by which I mean surprised? (15)
Even if Sleep and Death are Brothers
Two children feeding what appears to be a baby goose.
Of beaten gold—gold beaten
to a thinness like that of paper—a woman's
funeral mask. A satyr, feeding
a baby satyr. A field of battle, lone harpy
in the sky above it, to say death, closing in, even as
the distance between longing
for the not-yet-experienced and for what's already lost
keeps diminishing. In one version,
Achilles has no idea that the warrior he's killed
is Penthesilea—a woman. He lifts the helmet off
by its gore-spattered plume, he falls
immediately in love with her stopped face.
We swam too soon; or we swam
too far. As if gracelessness
were as easily avoidable as knowing
when to give in, finally, and no one cared
about grace. I've made enemies, should I make
peace with them? Where am I? Let whoever
loved me, by remembering, prove it. Will my son survive? (34)
Defiance
Some say the point of war
is to make the need for tenderness
more clear. Some say that’s an effect of war, the way
beauty can be: Homer’s Iliad, for example; or—
many centuries later—how the horse’s head,
to protect it in combat, would be fitted
with a shaffron, a strip of steel,
sometimes mixed with copper, all of it
hammer-worked, parts detailed
in gold. I love you, as I’ve
always loved you, one man says,
meaning it, to another. That doesn’t make
love true. This only needs to be troubling
if we want it to be. Our minds are
as the days are, dark
or bright, says Homer, the words like coral-bells
in a pot made to look like the head of an ancient god—
a sea-god, moss for seaweed across the old
god’s face. To believe in ritual in the name
of hope, there lies disaster.
And turned to him.
And took his hand—the scarred one; I could
feel the scars... Little crowns. Mass
coronation. For by then all the lilies on the pond had opened. (51)
The tickseed thriving in banks like clouds beneath us
The idea of a wind
The clean commitment every instinct comes down to in the hawk descending
Actual wind, waves as waves
The idea of a body
Waves as merely interruptions for once across the lake's flat surface
Only what you yourself mean to it, yes
Your idea of the world
The body as a shield keeping slightly at bay what it also reflects
Everything you've lived for
Its raised wings machete-ing the space between want and having
For hours, I lay beside him in the pear tree's shadow, watching him sleep (11-2)
Snow
Or am I not
still the victor, who knows to look but once upon his conquests,
then away, lest he seem vulnerable, by which I mean surprised? (15)
Even if Sleep and Death are Brothers
Two children feeding what appears to be a baby goose.
Of beaten gold—gold beaten
to a thinness like that of paper—a woman's
funeral mask. A satyr, feeding
a baby satyr. A field of battle, lone harpy
in the sky above it, to say death, closing in, even as
the distance between longing
for the not-yet-experienced and for what's already lost
keeps diminishing. In one version,
Achilles has no idea that the warrior he's killed
is Penthesilea—a woman. He lifts the helmet off
by its gore-spattered plume, he falls
immediately in love with her stopped face.
We swam too soon; or we swam
too far. As if gracelessness
were as easily avoidable as knowing
when to give in, finally, and no one cared
about grace. I've made enemies, should I make
peace with them? Where am I? Let whoever
loved me, by remembering, prove it. Will my son survive? (34)
Defiance
Some say the point of war
is to make the need for tenderness
more clear. Some say that’s an effect of war, the way
beauty can be: Homer’s Iliad, for example; or—
many centuries later—how the horse’s head,
to protect it in combat, would be fitted
with a shaffron, a strip of steel,
sometimes mixed with copper, all of it
hammer-worked, parts detailed
in gold. I love you, as I’ve
always loved you, one man says,
meaning it, to another. That doesn’t make
love true. This only needs to be troubling
if we want it to be. Our minds are
as the days are, dark
or bright, says Homer, the words like coral-bells
in a pot made to look like the head of an ancient god—
a sea-god, moss for seaweed across the old
god’s face. To believe in ritual in the name
of hope, there lies disaster.
And turned to him.
And took his hand—the scarred one; I could
feel the scars... Little crowns. Mass
coronation. For by then all the lilies on the pond had opened. (51)
November 4, 2022
The poetry in this collection is tenderly devastating, like falling asleep to lullaby and heartbreak. The imagery is haunting, such as "The orchard was on fire, but that didn't stop him from slowly walking straight into it, shirtless, you can see where the flames have foliaged- here, especially- his chest" (Dirt Being Dirt, 14). Then there is Phillips' meandering use of qualifying clauses to stretch and abstract an idea, which by some alchemy turns thought into deeply held feeling. Phillips somehow captures in his words the immense complexity of regret, loss, heartbreak, memory, amnesia, love, longing, and suffering. It is utterly captivating, and I'll be returning to this collection when I'm at my lowest.
Some of my favorite quotes:
"I'm thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten." (Pale Colors in a Tall Field, 6)
"And he woke again like a thief undetected, invisible therefore, and therefore free." (Blue Wash on Linen Canvas, Believed Unfinished, 8)
"we stood precisely at that point in being young that's just before the moment when what we expect is one thing, and what we hope, another." (To All Appearances, 9)
"When I'm ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown- to have let it show - that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong." (Blow it Back, 25)
"Nothing's right, or can be made right, or that's for days how it's felt, between us. Camouflage, or foliage? Intention, or just the way things are? You're far, somehow. And I can't see far." (Skylark, 29)
"Let whoever loved me, by remembering, prove it." (Even If Sleep and Death Are Brothers, 34)
"Sometimes, to trust the sea isn't so much the point, anymore, as to know - without minding it - the sea's indifference." (Said the House to the Light, 37)
Some of my favorite quotes:
"I'm thinking more how there's a kind of violence to re-entering unexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but got torn away from so long ago it's more than half forgotten." (Pale Colors in a Tall Field, 6)
"And he woke again like a thief undetected, invisible therefore, and therefore free." (Blue Wash on Linen Canvas, Believed Unfinished, 8)
"we stood precisely at that point in being young that's just before the moment when what we expect is one thing, and what we hope, another." (To All Appearances, 9)
"When I'm ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown- to have let it show - that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong." (Blow it Back, 25)
"Nothing's right, or can be made right, or that's for days how it's felt, between us. Camouflage, or foliage? Intention, or just the way things are? You're far, somehow. And I can't see far." (Skylark, 29)
"Let whoever loved me, by remembering, prove it." (Even If Sleep and Death Are Brothers, 34)
"Sometimes, to trust the sea isn't so much the point, anymore, as to know - without minding it - the sea's indifference." (Said the House to the Light, 37)
January 4, 2022
"For mostly, yes, we were silent - tired, as well, though as much out of boredom as for the need to stretch a bit, why not the rest on foot, we at last decided - and dismounting, each walked with his horse close beside him. We mapped our way north by the stars, old school, until there were no stars, just the weather of childhood, where it's snowing forever."
- from, Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors
I hadn't read anything else by Carl Phillips before picking up this book for a craft class so I didn't know I was about to read some of the most gorgeous lines I have encountered. The voices he uses in this collection are tender, surprising, intuitive and nothing short of inspired. For me, he strikes the perfect balance between philosophical engagement and plain spoken diction. These poems can float but they don't start out that way, you hardly notice what is happening until suddenly a line lifts you high enough to see.
"...Some - the luckiest -/arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where/to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,/or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl/before them, one after the other, each a seemingly/vast underworld of damage they didn't have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed/it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was/was their own."
-from On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching
My only quibble with this book is a selfish one. It is very slim: 52 pages. I wanted more than the 34 poems. Not that this volume is incomplete but that I just met a favorite poet and now I'm a little bit obsessed.
- from, Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors
I hadn't read anything else by Carl Phillips before picking up this book for a craft class so I didn't know I was about to read some of the most gorgeous lines I have encountered. The voices he uses in this collection are tender, surprising, intuitive and nothing short of inspired. For me, he strikes the perfect balance between philosophical engagement and plain spoken diction. These poems can float but they don't start out that way, you hardly notice what is happening until suddenly a line lifts you high enough to see.
"...Some - the luckiest -/arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where/to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,/or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl/before them, one after the other, each a seemingly/vast underworld of damage they didn't have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed/it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was/was their own."
-from On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching
My only quibble with this book is a selfish one. It is very slim: 52 pages. I wanted more than the 34 poems. Not that this volume is incomplete but that I just met a favorite poet and now I'm a little bit obsessed.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 81 reviews