Speak Low

by Carl Phillips

Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive―and one of poetry's most essential―contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has 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. These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low 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. Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Genres: Poetry, Queer, Nonfiction, American, Mythology, Contemporary, LGBT

68 pages, Hardcover

First published March 31, 2009

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

[KFed]

Do you ever not like a book and then feel really guilty about it? Like you've disappointed someone whose opinion you really respect, or hurt someone you care about, unexpectedly. A weird kind of embarrassed, surprised guilt.

That's what I felt about this book. I knew pretty much from the first poem that Phillips's language wasn't going to work for me, but I tried to stick it out. The problem is that the language didn't seem refined enough; there seemed, in places, to be too many words that weren't adding up to enough.

Disliking this book makes me feel uncomfortable because I feel like he's an author whose work I should like. My bias with poetry is for language that strikes me as really pure, taut. The poems here struck me as imitative of this, and ultimately, they seemed very hollow.

[gabrielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

i knew i was pushing myself out of my comfort zone when i chose to buy this anthology. usually, i don’t like poetry i can’t understand, poetry that is linguistically beautiful but that feels distant. i guess i had an intuition about this one though, that it would push me to appreciate things i don’t normally spend enough time appreciating in poetry– form, precision, diction, punctuation.

what is there to say about this anthology but that it’s beautiful, it’s stunning? i finish his poems, often not knowing what they “mean”, and yet i feel full of wonder.

it seems like a lot of his poetry is getting at the inadequacy of language to capture certain moments, certain sentiments, and yet i think that he gets at close as possible to capturing it using language. it’s really interesting this insistence that language is but a tool, an approximation of a moment, and yet how we insist on trying to use it to the best of our ability to capture it all.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

What limits this for me, despite several extraordinary poems (e.g., The Centaur, and The Raft), is its incessant occasion, the way however precisely Phillips sees between his classical textual tradition and experience identity, the occasion remains "tethered" to the text and hasn't been granted its linguistic modality. The warrant against my criticism is the classical tradition itself, obviously. Just so, the recourse is incessant. Where the precision warrants exploration, the writing can be quite loose, and self-absorbed. Movingly so, at times. At other times, not so much. I wish I liked the whole thing as much I like its parts.

[Ron Charles · Rating 4 out of 5]

Earlier this month, Carl Phillips was my guest in “The Life of a Poet” series, sponsored by the Hill Center and the Library of Congress. I had not met Phillips before that evening, but he was a fantastic interview subject – witty, candid and thoughtful. And he read his own poems beautifully.

For more and a video of our conversation, go to The Washington Post:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/s...

[Max Potthoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

"A finch settles on a tiger lily like an intended kindness beneath which the stem bends slightly, not so much receiving as accommodating the new weight, the way truth accommodates distortion, and can still seem true". While I enjoyed Speak Low a little less than more recent works of Carl Phillips, I loved reading this as a prelude to Wild is the Wind. Very dynamic to see how much his voice has changed in less than a decade, while still maintaining the strength and simplicity that makes him so engaging.

[Carmyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

I chose to read one of Carl Phillips more recent poetry books because I'd read a review that said it was a bit of a departure from his other work and I thought it might prove an interesting touchpoint in book club discussions, but we didn't really get to discuss his work all that much when we met with him for dinner during the UND writer's conference. I saw him read after our meal, and he was soft spoken, a slow and dramatic reader. He called grammar sexy. THAT cracked me up. :) (Yet, I can relate.)

His poetry is loaded with Greek allusion and often rather murky for me to wade through. I find I'm not typically left with a solid take on a given poem and instead am left with an impression. Much of his work, even in this book has sexual undertones and at times sex as its subject or seems to be about relationships. But then I think he said in his reading that relationships are part of everything, but then again who are you when you're by yourself? His poetry is filled with sea images, water, birds, trees, falcons...

I didn't love any one particular poem in its entirety, rather I had gems of lines or images that resonated:

Speak Low (3)
"... the water
was water--was a form of clarity itself, a window we've
no sooner looked through than we've abandoned it for what
lies past that: a view, and then what comes..."

Conquest (7)
"Speaking to himself, I think, not me, You have wanted
more than was yours to wish for, he said--as if even
to wishing the laws of modesty and excess could be applied
and should be. We slept. I dreamed..."

I like this line in Captivity (11)
"In the book of the body that is yours--where it's never as late
as I thought it was"

I like "Lighting the Lamps" on p. 13 with its raven imagery and talk of mistakes.

I also liked "To Drown in Honey" on p. 14 -- mostly this line:
"You can build for yourself a tower to signal from
Can become a still life. A slow ruin. You can
walk away. They all say that. Sir, I see no way"

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Once I started feeling as though the titles of these poems could be interchanged and it wouldn't change the poems for me, I lost hope of connecting to them in a whole way. Like other readers, I was zapped by certain lines but not by entire poems. I like the idea of the people in the poems being real or mythic, and the repetition of terms and images throughout the volume--the word "pattern" for example, or the sea, birds, etc. as others have pointed out as well. My inability to connect is due to a lack of background with "The Classics," and my preference for a punchier language and what I suppose you'd call a cleaner line, with fewer interruptive clauses. I think "Cloud Country" is my favorite poem, for its title, suggestive of a contemplative drift; the passage about life, death, and "a sense of possibility;" and the summer roses.

For me, these lines in the volume stepped out and sung:

From "Lighting the Lamps" (as an opening line and its directness--reminds me of Plath):
I've bloomed twice in this life already.

From "Captivity":
the clouds of everything that
I've been wrong about in this life pass singly overhead as if
for review

From "Directions from Here":
that reassurance that,
in the dark, the body gives more reliably than
the saints or prayer can. A silence,as of snow,
for miles.

[Jon · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really liked the first poem, "Speak Low" and the rest were good--although sometimes I couldn't quite figure out what was going on in them. This poem collection dovetailed nicely with Secret Historian: The Life and Times of Samuel Steward, Professor, Tattoo Artist, and Sexual Renegade that I just finished reading.

[Shin · Rating 4 out of 5]

we sometimes mistake poetry for an alternative device, a meaning-making tool, that by words and structure would 'reveal' complications that persist in the external and internal dimensions of our lives. but while poems may be referrent to life, we cannot demand it to simplify the complex, nor can we demand a poem to be simplify-able. we do not always have to be able to derive other assimilations from what it assimilates within itself. we do not always have to finish a poem and say "this is about this, this is derived from that." a poem can consist not of metaphors of other things, but things of its own belonging. self-containing self-affiriming concepts. and if a poem addresses the complex and complicated, doesn't it make sense that it is also by its own right complex and complicated?

#CarlPhillips likes to grapple with the unspeakable. he dips into pools of emotions yet named, his cupped hands come out with these pieces that are just so raw and tangled yet clear and refined. there's a lot on the relationships between contradicting forms in #SpeakLow (rest & restlessness; what we know we should do VS the rest we do; what the body contains VS what it makes; a lot of these).

there are recurring images of trees and water, and in this collection Greek myth. if i have to place what he unravelled here in life as i know it, many of the poems remind me of that state between desiring and desperation, or when the person you're in bed with is so deep in dreams already while you're still up and lost, mind wandering. Speak Low consists of mostly peaceful narratives, in spite of the layered imagery and interrupted elaborations.

i admit that i have not grasped all that he meant to say, but the ones i did, i totally loved.

#poetry #bookstagram

[Corin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Plains of Troy

It is Odysseus who, having seen his rival Ajax brought down
by madness, equates life on earth with nothing--all of it
illusion. The Greek camp lies rippling in front of him
with the latest slaughter, with a seeming addiction to rank,
stamina, the cleanest distance from shame possible, and
to a longing that at once is sexual and somewhere also
has to do with war as the context without which
value's shape
becomes barely discernable. Three horses turn softly,
simultaneous in the wind's direction. A series of veils--
raised and unraised: Is this what it comes to, the examined life?
Must it? The drive toward meaning not, in fact, in the face of
meaninglessness, but of irrelevance--to have meant,
without mattering finally--that more palpable darkness,
magesterially unfurling its wings, then folding them equally around
the sleepers, the awake and restless, the freshly raped, the slain?

[May]

to wake each morning feels not like waking / but like having been washed up from dreamlessness onto a shore of our own hard making that, gradually, we've learned to stop trying

(I still do not know how to properly rate poetry, hence the empty rating.)

This is a little collection I found in a pile of books Franz passed to me. Having not read any poetry this year, I gave it a go. I've not read any of Phillips's prior works.

Anyway, a few notes

- Didn't understand any of it when I was casually reading. Had a more pleasant experience when I was fully in the reading-zone.
- A looooot of references o Greek mythology, of which I am not well-versed.
- If you're up for poems about threesomes, desire, death, psychology and well-tuned observations of landscapes, you'll probably like this.
- Some very lovely lines. I liked only a few of the poems, not all of them.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

How is it possible for a book to be so utterly intense, beautiful, profound, & resonant, & yet remain almost entirely mysterious to you? Every poem like you're just being dropped into the middle of some continuous, perplexing, ever-shifting thought or conversation. So--terribly, menacingly, beautifully--abstract & yet, in terms of imagery, pretty concrete & yet so full & digressing in the concreteness, the abstraction blooming in between the spaces between the physical phenomena themselves, as he scans & transforms the strange landscape in which he has located the poem. Such complexity I can barely contain it; it invites & refuses me endlessly, almost indifferently.

Ah. Not unlike, I suppose, every single lover whom some part of me has, still, never known how to let go.

[Yifei Men]

Not rated because I didn't finish the book

Really liked the opening poem and its dance between light and wind and waters -- sensual, moving, emotive.

I like that the poems have some length, and don't break down into a word soup; but didn't really get most of the reference beyond what's being described literally.

[anon · Rating 3 out of 5]

Patterned by occasional flashes of brilliance and (very dark) beauty, these poems feel somewhat convoluted and characterized by a scenic vagueness, like manic late-night dramatizations scrawled haphazardly in the private notebook of a cruel, self-loathing, and educated-far-past-his-own-good boyfriend.

[Jose Felipe · Rating 3 out of 5]

was a bit slow- not as consistent as "pale colors" but still some great poems- lost my faith in him a little somewhere in there but he really shines when he is able to use images with his philosophical musings rather than just the philosphy apsect

[Jason · Rating 4 out of 5]

Difficult poems you have to work at.
some of my favorites were:
Speak Low
Conquest
Rubicon
Captivity
Porcelain
Naming the Stars

[Muhammad Rajab Al-mukarrom · Rating 4 out of 5]

Me likey!

[Maughn Gregory · Rating 4 out of 5]

So beautiful, even when (especially when?) to me, inscrutable.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carl Phillips, Speak Low (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009)

Love and power intertwine in Speak Low, the most recent book by Carl Phillips, and that can make for a discomfiting mix for those of us who don't follow the same path. Balanced against that is the fact that Phillips is not an impulsive poet; his work is introspective, measured, capable of conveying the attraction in a way that makes it understandable for us normals while still conveying the discomfiture:

“...I even think they look, more/than a little bit, like rough sex once it's gone where, of/course, it had to—do you know what I mean, his smell/on you after, like those parts of the gutted deer that/the men bring home with them, fresh from the hunt,/as if you were like that now, the parts, not the smell, I/mean as if you were his, all you'd ever wanted to be,/and how you almost believe that?...”
(“Distortion”)

On second thought, that probably wasn't the most introspective OR measured passage I could have chosen to illustrate that point. Compared to the rest of the book, it's almost breathless with passion. But you get my point, right? If you actually try to describe said rough sex you're heading straight into porn territory. Instead, Phillips takes a left turn into Hemingway's hunting camp, and BDSM becomes something even the lunkest-headed redneck is capable of at least grasping, if not identifying with.

As such, I'm putting aside my usual disclaimer of “if you like that sort of thing” when I review books that deal with this subject. Even if you don't, this is well worth your time. Phillips is an excellent poet, a guy who understands that word choice is important and understands how those carefully-chosen words fit together in order to make something beautiful.

“Color of rust, russet. Color of fall. I can lay me head/on the wet sand that is nobody's chest now—not a chest,/at all—or I can lift it. Why not lift it? More fugitive than/lost, more spent than stranded, if I've been no stranger/to disillusionment,//nor am I enslaved to it....”
(“The Raft”)

****

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

Phillips has a way of analyzing experience so that it feels both intellectual and felt. Almost as though the poems take one small step away from their subject (which in this case centers mainly around romance and what it means for it to end), and then offer the reader a view that is filled by a slowed-down pathos described intelligently and thoroughly. I would compare it to being given a rose, and then having each petal of the rose made as sensuous and important as the rose itself, as well as the gesture of giving.

I often find myself enthusiastic about a kind of poetry that makes me feel there is always more to be said, a poetry of effervescent potential. With this book, that potential comes in the full breadth of experiencing any emotion, and the struggle to name what that emotion should be.

[Nicole Hardina · Rating 5 out of 5]

As a person who wants to write good poetry, I've been advised to stay away from being cerebral; it inhibits "the leap," I've been told, in which the mind is allowed to free-associate; it can be limiting, as some poetry I've read, wherein if you aren't interested in the content, there's nothing there for you. In this book, Carl Phillips is both cerebral and imagistic; he leaps. He bounds. He flies. He is a careful observer and a thorough thinker who exposes nuanced truths. Something I truly enjoyed about this book is his capacity to find the vast residing in the intimate, and the intimate in the vast.

[R.G. Evans · Rating 2 out of 5]

A thematic mashup of sexual domination and ancient Greek philosophies on war and the use of force, the poems in Speak Low seemed to me bloodless and hermetically personal. Although this book was a National Book Award finalist and seems to be universally praised as fine poems from one of America's essential poets, I just couldn't find a way into most of these poems.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

Carl Phillips is a strong poet, mixing the literary and the sensual, the natural and the intellectual. While I enjoyed a great many of these poems, I also felt like something was lacking, something that would have put them over the top, making them transcendent and truly classic. These are dense, challenging pieces, no doubt, and they are rich with image, allusion and beauty.

[Poets.org from the Academy of American Poets]

Prepare for the 2010 Poets Forum in New York City (October 28-30) by reading Phillips's newest book of poetry, and check out the Poets Forum 2010 bookshelf for the latest collections by each of the poets participating in the Poets Forum. Happy reading!

[Geoff Wehmeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Who we were,
in a lineup beside four versions of what we've turned into,
and ourselves the victim, exhausted, confused, unable to
say with any real certainty
who did it

[Kurtis Kozel · Rating 5 out of 5]

Don't go into this book expecting normal language. Phillips writes in metaphor, incomplete sentences, and grammar hidden up his sleeves. Perhaps a bit too far. Read it once if you want to be challenged, read it twice if you want to understand it.

[Jordan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Personally, I have to read Carl's poems slowly. They are so intricate and dense with emotion and linguistic play. It took a while for me to get through this collection but it was totally worth it.

[Kat Lewis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Favorite book of poetry I've read all year.