Pastoral

Carl Phillips is the author of nine previous books of poems, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006 ; Riding Westward ; and The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. Phillips here creates a shadowy inner landscape, one where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully yet often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us–believing in the possibility of light–seeks to penetrate.
Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us–how to realize the self entirely, and in time–these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the formal backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry? Or when making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent and emotionally nuanced, Pastoral enlarges–and also defines–Phillips’s already impressive poetic landscape.

Desire–erotic and spiritual–courses passionately through this collection: the strict shape desire inflicts on the chaos desire lets loose. But Phillips addresses not only passion, but art, history, nature: all, in his hands, are forms of wanting. His rhythms are beautifully and powerfully various–sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant–as he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; [this book] both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes. –Jorie Graham

In this brilliant fourth collection, foreboding fields and roaming creatures [both] echo the sorrow, alienation, and eros of bodily existence. – Publishers Weekly (starred review)