The Tether

by Carl Phillips

Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill.

As I understand it, I could
call him. Though it would help,
it is not required that I give him
a name first. Also, nothing
says he stops, then, or must turn.
--from "The Figure, the Boundary, the Light"

In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor's anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection -- between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch -- and ts the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground.

Contemporary literature can perhaps claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips's characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever."

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 3, 2001

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

[Alisha Bruton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillips's poems are unpredictably wounding. He writes as if English were not a word-order language: each sentence seems, at first, out of order. After reading it again, though, it becomes clear that his rearrangement of words hasn't compromised clarity, but rather brought a new, subtle meaning to the poem.

He has an ability to draw large, abstract meaning from simple objects or events; his awareness and intelligence in doing this surprising me anew as I read more and more of his books. His heavy honesty with himself around his true motives is convicting; often, after reading his poems, I want to go bury my head in the sand like an ostrich. Ah, the mark of good poetry!

One of my favorite lines of his:

"Not being myself, able to account
for hours of my own absence, or
not being asked, by anyone, to-
which is worse, I can't say."
-The Figure, The Boundary, The Light

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

While Phillips's poetry remains gnawingly opaque, after a second volume of luminous poems I'm starting to adjust to the register he operates in--finding myself able to latch onto strings of thoughts and emotions, beginning to relish the puzzle each syntactically inverted line presents. Often I had the impression of skating easily along the crystalline surfaces of the words until suddenly, unexpectedly, dropping into the gaping caverns of emotions lurking beneath. Will inevitably read more.

"I have in mind
only how even a least

disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing's
beauty, can at last

define it"

-C. Phillips, "Words of Love"

[Holly · Rating 4 out of 5]

I bring to/get from Carl Phillips's poems something different every time I read them. Challenging poems. My favorites of this collection: "Words of Love," "A Force, and Would Consume Us," "The Pinnacle," and "Revision."

. . . steadfastness remains
one of my two gifts, the other
less gift, perhaps, than simply a matter
of I can't help it,
namely a knack for making anything

mean something.

[jen · Rating 4 out of 5]

first read: carl phillips breaks english? ~tersets~ and new syntax. feeling so alienated, deprived of touch after this. words and touch do not suffice. read "words of love," the reviews are probably true.
---
second read: i love renewed the soul as beloved, and how far away our soul grows from our body - this "part of me that would walk past, or as if away toward // another ending—"

[chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

The field is yours, that
I stagger back to.
-- "To the Falconer"

[Calen Firedancing · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Karen Lepri · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am a big fan of almost everything Carl Phillips has written--I get sucked into his hyper-punctuated, abandoned/refound/abandoned/refound rule-bound/broken syntax. This book is a good example of these maneuvers, but not as sexy as, say, some later poems in Riding Westward.

[Jeff · Rating 1 out of 5]

Wretched bullshit.