The Rest of Love: Poems - Hardcover

Phillips, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374249539 ISBN 13: 9780374249533

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004

Synopsis

The light, for as far as
I can see, is that of any number of late

afternoons I remember still: how the light
seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living
insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about

that one clear note it gives.
--from "Late Apollo III"

In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire--physical, emotional, and spiritual.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of six previous books of poems, including Rock Harbor and The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. The recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, he teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

From Publishers Weekly

Furthering an idiom worked up over six previous books and showing no signs of exhaustion, Phillips delivers another brittle, electric set of poems on love, sex, masculinity and their classical contours. In 33 lyrics divided over three sections, Phillips's unmistakable, short-lined apostrophes, riddled with exhalative em-dashes and pulled-up-short interrogatives, perform the kind of personal control that, before The Tether, would have been a main component of domination, but has slowly modulated into conscious attempts at sharing one's physical and psychic lives fully-or as fully as possible: "to what extent can this be said, and/ it be true? and/ it be false?/ Under what conditions?// Under whose conditions?" Phillips finds a series of images, from "White Dog" ("First snow-I release her into it") to a donkey in Santiago ("He shot the ass/ in the head. Simple.") to "the boy at the bow" of a sculling crew ("the rest of the boys/ sang back"), and works each singly and satisfyingly. And as with Phillips's other recent work, while the poems do not form a series, they seem to provide multiple and overlapping accounts of the title's excess (or its repose) without trying to define it. The result will not only please fans, but will send new readers back to recent books, which may be accumulating more quickly than they can be absorbed.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0374249539
• ISBN 13: 9780374249533
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 70