The Tether: Poems - Hardcover

Phillips, Carl

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374267936 ISBN 13: 9780374267933

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001

Synopsis

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

"Like something broken of wing,
lying there.
Other than breathing's rise, catch,

release,
a silence, as of some especially wounded
animal that, nevertheless, still

is conscious,
you can see
straight through the open

eye to where instinct falters because
for once it has come
divided"

--from "Chamber Music"

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 its 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.

About this title

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of four books of poems, including Pastoral and From the Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award. He is an associate professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reviews

With his signature clausal intricacies and forbiddingly terse tercets intact, Phillips makes the jump after four books with Graywolf to FSG. Yet where books like Cort?ge (1995) and From the Devotions (1998) were fraught attempts finding a language to control highly charged, even mortally erotic circumstance, last year's Pastoral, while still saturated with difficult longing, hinted at the possibility of d?tente. The grudging pleasures and negotiations of leashed life are the main subjects of this fifth collection, which looks back to previous work and, for the first time, forward to the beloved's continued presence: "There was, one time, a stag / And now there isn't,// is there?/ And no, he won't come,/ ever, back. This is the widening, but// not unbeautiful wake of his having/ left us." While the hunt, a recurrent Phillips motif, continues here, and "carnage's/ bright details" (i.e., cheating) are suitably hung up, they are more instinctual relapse than planned pursuit, and are dealt with accordingly. The book's last poem, "Revision," shifts from intentionally unstable tercets to firmly decisive couplets, mirroring the speaker's aware-of-the-stakes commitment: "I recognize you / and the recognizing has the effect of/ slowing down that// part of me that would/ walk past, or as if away toward// another ending You/ speak first. And I'll answer." (Apr.) Forecast: Along with Henri Cole, Phillips some of the most formally accomplished first-person poems of male desire and relationships of his generation worthy of immediate generational predecessors Gunn and Bidart. This book should bring Phillips deserved mid-career accolades, and pave the way for a new and selected volume.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In his fifth book, National Book Award finalist Phillips quietly explores the implications suggested by the word tether, infusing his strikingly spare poems with a sense of restraint, of being held on to, of pulling against the tug of gravity, the weight of death. Phillips writes reflectively, quietly, and intensely about luck, ambition, the unstated but understood contract between predator and prey, the negotiations of desire, and the mysterious, conflicted symbiosis between body and soul. As he moves from the stillness of a field to the sound of a passing train to an unexpected meditation on Julius Caesar to a depiction of a falconer and his bird, Phillips considers the pleasure and sorrow of sex, the confusion of witnessing the suffering of another, the clarity of pain, and the legacy of loss that untethers memory even as it ties us to a larger past and a greater power that urges us to make love and art. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

This latest from Phillips (Pastoral) is aptly named, for the poems all explore connection: the connection of lover and loved, of body and soul, of observer and observed, even of moments in time ("How did I get here,/ we ask one day"). We feel the connection implicitly in the tightly constructed lines, which pulse with restrained energy, with what is left unsaid (these pieces are finely honed). Starker and a bit darker than Phillips's previous work, these poems are intellectually challenging, requiring (and certainly meriting) many readings. Occasionally, the intensive punctuation irritates, causing odd halts that leave one begging to breathe. But these elliptical, ruminative works are worth the effort. Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LUCK

What we shall not perhaps get over, we
do get past, until -- innocent,
with art for once

not in mind, How did I get here,
we ask one day, our gaze
relinquishing one space for the next

in which, not far from where
in the uncut grass we're sitting
four men arc the unsaid

between them with the thrown
shoes of horses, luck briefly as a thing
of heft made to shape through

air a path invisible, but there . . .
Because we are flesh, because
who doesn't, some way, require touch,

it is the unsubstantial -- that which can
neither know touch nor be known
by it -- that most bewilders,

even if the four men at
play, if asked, presumably,
would not say so, any more

than would the fifth man, busy
mowing the field's far
edge, behind me,

his slow, relentless pace promising
long hours before the sorrow
of seeing him go and,

later still, the sorrow
going, until eventually the difficulty
only is this: there was some.

JUST SOUTH OF THE KINGDOM

It is for, you see, eventually the deer to
take it, the fruit

hangs there. Meanwhile, they
graze with the kind

of idleness that suggests
both can be true: to see -- and seem

not to -- the possible danger of
us watching;

to notice, and to also
be indifferent to the certain

plunder of, between them
and us, the lone

tree, thick with apples the deer have
only to nose

up against,
what's ripe will fall, will

become theirs.
-- A breeze, slightly --

in which, if nobody, nothing moves,
nevertheless when it comes to

waiting it is useless,
understand, to think the deer

won't outlast us. They have,
as do all animals before the getting

tamed, a patience that
comes from the expectation of,

routinely, some hungering.
Ourselves, we are bored easily:

how much time can
be left before -- as toward, say, an impossible suitor whom already
we've kept long enough

baying -- we'll turn away, and
begin the life I've heard tell of?

The light is less, there. One of us
has betrayed the other.

SPOILS, DIVIDING

Thank you for asking --
yes,
I have thought on the soul,

I have decided
it should not be faulted for
its indifference: that is as it

must be.
How blame
the lantern whose limits

always are only the light of
itself, casting the light
out?

That the body enjoys
some moment
in that light, I regard

as privilege.
Say what
you will.

The hawk's shadow
darkening
the zeroed -- in -- upon prey,

Copyright © 2001 Carl Phillips

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374267936
• ISBN 13: 9780374267933
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80