Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 - Softcover

Phillips, Carl

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530785 ISBN 13: 9780374530785

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive―and one of poetry's most essential―contemporary voices.

Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

Phillips's sensibility as he questions morality, psychology, and our notions of responsibility is as startlingly original as the poems themselves, whose exacting standards for the line's flexibility and whose argument for a versatile, more muscular syntax bring to American poetry "something not unlike a new musical scale" (The Miami Herald). Quiver of Arrows is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

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.

From the Back Cover

Praise for author Carl Phillips:

"Singing the music of mythology, history and philosophy, [Phillips's] poems are delicately crafted to sound like common speech even though there is nothing pedestrian about them. Because of their dexterity, they are approachable without sacrificing their loftier aspirations." --Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald

From the Inside Flap

Praise for author Carl Phillips:

"Singing the music of mythology, history and philosophy, [Phillips's] poems are delicately crafted to sound like common speech even though there is nothing pedestrian about them. Because of their dexterity, they are approachable without sacrificing their loftier aspirations." --Dionisio Martinez, The Miami Herald

Reviews

Phillips is a scholar and translator of classical Greek and a writer of syntactically complex, desire-drenched love poems that subtly, and beautifully, reinvent classical tropes and forms. Phillips has published eight books of his own poetry: this selection pares down a rapidly expanding oeuvre to its sharp essentials. Phillips's first three books, published by Graywolf, show him working out his relation to the tradition—from the Famous Black Poet to Yeats (I recognized/ something more/ than swan to Sappho (My tongue still remembers)—and to AIDS and its aftermath: I watched as each boat fell to flame:/ Vincent and Matthew and, last, what bore your name. Pastoral (2000) finds Phillips confidently making the tercet into a representation of the lover's body, a practice that has culminated in four subsequent books rapidly published in the '00s—including The Tether and The Rest of Love—that contain extraordinary and strange examples of Phillips's trademark writing about the bonds and bounds of sex and couplehood: —Singing inside the mirror,/ to no one, to// itself, the body folding, and/ unfolding, as if map/ then shroud, its song. (May)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374530785
• ISBN 13: 9780374530785
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224