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Riding Westward
What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.
- GenresPoetry
64 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
1 person is currently reading
116 people want to read
About the author
Carl Phillips
88 books205 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 - 12 of 12 reviews
December 12, 2023
All along,
it was true: timing really
is everything.
I've lived this life.
If it's one thing to have missed the constellations for the stars themselves, it's another,
entirely, to have never looked up.
(From "Sea Glass")
Many of the poems on Phillips' 2006 collection feel like you've been dropped in on an intimate conversation, deep heart talk infused with emotion.
...maybe humility really is a virtue I should be more concerned about, weaving among the lost as I've woven so long, I astonish no one now, raise no suspiscion.
--When did the damned become this indifferent?
(From "The Lower Marshes")
it was true: timing really
is everything.
I've lived this life.
If it's one thing to have missed the constellations for the stars themselves, it's another,
entirely, to have never looked up.
(From "Sea Glass")
Many of the poems on Phillips' 2006 collection feel like you've been dropped in on an intimate conversation, deep heart talk infused with emotion.
...maybe humility really is a virtue I should be more concerned about, weaving among the lost as I've woven so long, I astonish no one now, raise no suspiscion.
--When did the damned become this indifferent?
(From "The Lower Marshes")
August 11, 2018
"look back. Regret, / like pity, changes nothing really, we say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time / swimming a bit farther, / leaving the shore the way / the water - in its own watered, of course, version / of semaphore - keeps leaving the subject out, flashing / why should it matter now and why, / why shouldn't it, / as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's / how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine."
March 12, 2021
The images in this poetry collection were startling. It kept my attention all the way through and I would recommend it to fans of Richard Siken (or maybe even Ocean Vuong. I don't know, I've only really read enough poetry collections to count on my fingers).
January 19, 2017
A short read again which is out of my language. Well not totally, 'cause I can relate to some or maybe I was not entirely in the mood to fully digest all of his deep words 'cause I'm sick or perhaps my mind is floating in that shallow part of romanticism that I didn't get some of his poems. But like I said, I liked some and this one hits me the most.
In Waves
It is a shadow I break inside of,
then break again.
Am I not reliable?
Bells-in-a-wind,
in storm: there are worse ways.
Everywhere, the lives that leave you - you, who
let them, sorrow sings to me.
Also regret. Also
apology. Then - rock-a-bye-
they leave too.
We're alone again. Sometimes I think
we are what force and a capacity for
being forced not so much
must look like, as can, the one
thrown crossways over the other, Give me, Give it
to me. Give it back.
As when he passes in,
then out of me, as if would steer toward a nobler
falling - nobler, farther, were there such a thing, what
that might look like. A crown, a lily, a boat
with which, in which to rest, cargo-like, in the clear of winter, then stir again- ravished,
ravishing. Things that are damnable.
Things that are damned. Who says so?
Who wants for nothing?
As when he passed, that first time, his good hand
over me, over my hand - and I was changed:
Tremble, he says. I tremble,
changed, before him. Stop it, he says, he
says slowly, he pulls me close to him, Stop shaking.
Words like these breaks my heart into pieces T_T
In Waves
It is a shadow I break inside of,
then break again.
Am I not reliable?
Bells-in-a-wind,
in storm: there are worse ways.
Everywhere, the lives that leave you - you, who
let them, sorrow sings to me.
Also regret. Also
apology. Then - rock-a-bye-
they leave too.
We're alone again. Sometimes I think
we are what force and a capacity for
being forced not so much
must look like, as can, the one
thrown crossways over the other, Give me, Give it
to me. Give it back.
As when he passes in,
then out of me, as if would steer toward a nobler
falling - nobler, farther, were there such a thing, what
that might look like. A crown, a lily, a boat
with which, in which to rest, cargo-like, in the clear of winter, then stir again- ravished,
ravishing. Things that are damnable.
Things that are damned. Who says so?
Who wants for nothing?
As when he passed, that first time, his good hand
over me, over my hand - and I was changed:
Tremble, he says. I tremble,
changed, before him. Stop it, he says, he
says slowly, he pulls me close to him, Stop shaking.
Words like these breaks my heart into pieces T_T
March 13, 2025
Regret,
like pity, changes nothing really, we
say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time
swimming a bit farther,
leaving the shore the way
the water -- in its own watered, of course, verison
of semaphore -- keeps leaving the subject out, flashing
Why should it matter now and Why,
why shouldn't it,
as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's
how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.
-- "Radiance versus Ordinary Light"
Husk of a libretto
for the world as -- I can say it now -- I wanted it: a room
that swayed with rough courtship; my body not mine,
any more to ransom than to refuse. On the window's
glass where the larger moths had beaten
against it, a fine powder, a proof by morning I had only
to blow across. And it flew. It scattered.
-- "The Smell of Hay"
To bend when made to, as if
having been told: that's what
the reeds do. It's what the lost are for.
-- "The Lower Marshes"
like pity, changes nothing really, we
say to ourselves and, less often, to each other, each time
swimming a bit farther,
leaving the shore the way
the water -- in its own watered, of course, verison
of semaphore -- keeps leaving the subject out, flashing
Why should it matter now and Why,
why shouldn't it,
as the waves beat harder, hard against us, until that's
how we like it, I'll break your heart, break mine.
-- "Radiance versus Ordinary Light"
Husk of a libretto
for the world as -- I can say it now -- I wanted it: a room
that swayed with rough courtship; my body not mine,
any more to ransom than to refuse. On the window's
glass where the larger moths had beaten
against it, a fine powder, a proof by morning I had only
to blow across. And it flew. It scattered.
-- "The Smell of Hay"
To bend when made to, as if
having been told: that's what
the reeds do. It's what the lost are for.
-- "The Lower Marshes"
July 28, 2024
This is the second collection I’ve read by Carl Phillips, and both times I have been immediately hooked by his command of syntax - one of my favorite poets when it comes to studying punctuation! I’ve fallen in love with how his verses fold over and into each other, drawing readers toward a point of poetic singularity both dense and expansive in its self-reflection.
November 19, 2018
“You look
stranded, you say to him slowly,
meaning both things: the initial despair,
and that knack the marooned
find eventually for shaping a life from
what’s left — some berries, the wrecked ship
for kindling, a view of the sea
whose fault it’s been.” - “Native”
stranded, you say to him slowly,
meaning both things: the initial despair,
and that knack the marooned
find eventually for shaping a life from
what’s left — some berries, the wrecked ship
for kindling, a view of the sea
whose fault it’s been.” - “Native”
March 30, 2009
sigh. unbelievable. my favorite at the moment:
There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for
strangers: yes, and often, and—with few exceptions—
each desperate either to win back some kingdom he’d
lost, or to be, if only briefly, for once free of one. I did
what I could for them. They did—what they did . . . It was
as if we were rescuable, and worth rescuing, both, and
the gods had noticed this—it was as if there were gods—
and the sky meanwhile crowning every part of it, blue,
a blue crown . . . There’s a meadow I still go back to. It’s
just a meadow—with, sometimes, a stranger, passing
through, the occasional tenderness, a hand to my chest,
resting there, making me almost want to touch something,
someone back. I can feel all the wrecked birds—lying
huddled, slow-hearted, like so many stunned psalms,
against each other—start to stir inside me, their bits of
song giving way again to the usual questions: Why not
stay awhile here forever? and Isn’t this what you keep
coming for? and Is it? I’m tired of their questions. I’m
tired, I say to them—as, with all the sluggishness at first
of doing a thing they’d forgotten how to do, or forgotten
to want to, or had only hoped to forget, they indifferently
open, spread wide their interrogative, gray wings—
There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the grasses also traced, more subtly, below. As for
strangers: yes, and often, and—with few exceptions—
each desperate either to win back some kingdom he’d
lost, or to be, if only briefly, for once free of one. I did
what I could for them. They did—what they did . . . It was
as if we were rescuable, and worth rescuing, both, and
the gods had noticed this—it was as if there were gods—
and the sky meanwhile crowning every part of it, blue,
a blue crown . . . There’s a meadow I still go back to. It’s
just a meadow—with, sometimes, a stranger, passing
through, the occasional tenderness, a hand to my chest,
resting there, making me almost want to touch something,
someone back. I can feel all the wrecked birds—lying
huddled, slow-hearted, like so many stunned psalms,
against each other—start to stir inside me, their bits of
song giving way again to the usual questions: Why not
stay awhile here forever? and Isn’t this what you keep
coming for? and Is it? I’m tired of their questions. I’m
tired, I say to them—as, with all the sluggishness at first
of doing a thing they’d forgotten how to do, or forgotten
to want to, or had only hoped to forget, they indifferently
open, spread wide their interrogative, gray wings—
July 2, 2007
Holy shit. And holy fuck. This is the kind of book where you can only read one poem at a time, They hit you that hard, they are that difficult to digest. Many of the poems are painful- it seems as if Philips is confessing faults or regrets of his own, which, somehow, threaten to expose your own faults and regrets simply by the act of reading.
I've been called 'the Tin Man' in regards to poetry because I'm such a poetry snob. But this- this is fucking quality poetry. Solid, beautiful, powerful, heartbreaking.
I've been called 'the Tin Man' in regards to poetry because I'm such a poetry snob. But this- this is fucking quality poetry. Solid, beautiful, powerful, heartbreaking.
January 7, 2016
The collection was deep and honest. It keeps moving; up and down just like the waves and a thumbs up for that because he really did describe life as both a pain in the ass and heaven at the same time. His choice of words were bare and his bravery of exposing things is incredible.
August 26, 2024
So good what else can I say
January 4, 2012
Poems I couldn't really get into with the exception of a few lines here and there.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews