The Tether: Poems - Softcover

Phillips, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374528454 ISBN 13: 9780374528454

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002

Synopsis

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."

About this title

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, including Scattered Snows, to the North and Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. He lives on Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

Reviews

In his earlier votive and erotic poems, Phillips challenged his God with batter-my-heart provocations worthy of John Donne. In this collection, the poet's fifth, the divinity seems finally to have taken him at his word. The cockiness that once permeated the work ("Haven't I hymned your praise enough?" or "Hard Master / I called out / Undo me") has been subdued to a still, mature reverence. Phillips uses lyric turns to literally turn away, as if the knowledge he's come into were sometimes too much to bear, and a number of these poems conclude with small devastations. Of a hero looking down at his hands after battle in a kind of disbelief, he writes, "Translations are various: God, / If not for, If only— / Look what I've done." There is joy, though, too, and rapture—a notion developed in the extended falconry metaphor that gives the collection its title and its many medieval stags, orchards, kingdoms, and hunts. At the last, Phillips is a classicist and a translator, offering "less the truth, than a way to frame it."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374528454
• ISBN 13: 9780374528454
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96