Circumstances Beyond Our Control: Poems (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Softcover

Phillips, Robert

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801883784 ISBN 13: 9780801883781

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Robert Phillips is a prominent member of America's neglected "transition generation" of poets―those born in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His work has been included in many anthologies and textbooks. He gathers for his seventh full-length collection his best poems of the past six years, from dramatic monologues to personal lyrics. While most are free-verse, there are also sonnets, a villanelle, a ballade, an abecedarian, found poems, prose poems, haiku, and clerihews.

Divided into three sections―"Fire and Obsession," "A Little Light Music," and "Rituals"―this new volume reveals Phillips's playfulness and good humor, his high intelligence, and his musicality.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Phillips is a John and Rebecca Moores Professor at the University of Houston and literary executor of the American poets Delmore Schwartz and Karl Shapiro. His poetry has won an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Creative Artists' Public Service Award from New York State, and a Pushcart Prize, among others. His collection Breakdown Lane was named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times Book Review.

Review

"Phillips is a skillful poet of occasions, imitations, and pastiche, all offered up with a serious yet insouciant expression of 'I'll try this, too.'"

(Hudson Review)

"A high-spirited mix of playfulness, memory and social observation."

(Fritz Lanham Houston Chronicle)

"Clear, direct, accessible, and frequently very funny, Robert Phillips' poems should be better known."

(Peter Schmitt Sun-Sentinel)

"All lines so veracious."

(Marianne Moore)

"His work is engagingly open and accessible, his subjects painstakingly explored."

(James Dickey)

"There is a wry, self-deprecating intimacy and charm in Robert Phillips' poems that are not like anyone else writing today."

(Carolyn Kizer)

"Through all of the poems moves Mr. Phillips's inimitable voice―easy-going, spare, engaging, and inclined to comedy. Some of the richness comes from the equable telling of poignant or bitter things; it is like hearing depth charges in a calm sea."

(Richard Wilbur)

"An originally and consistently entertaining poet. Robert Phillips's plainspoken eloquence provides a tonic for readers who find that much contemporary poetry has little to say to them."

(Review of Texas Books)

"Whether admiring Phillips's exceptional craftsmanship, enjoying the humor that infiltrates even his most serious poems, or warming to the deep humaneness of his spirit, a reader feels at home in this collection, and in good company."

(Phi Kappa Phi Forum)

"Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire is extremely readable, and I would recommend it most particularly to anyone seeking a brief introduction to several of the key debates in medical history for the period: the notion of the medical marketplace; the dichotomy (or, rather, absence thereof) between temple and secular medicine; the links between the spread of empire and that of physicians, medical ideas, and pharmacological ingredients."

(Isis)

Edition details

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0801883784
• ISBN 13: 9780801883781
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88