Carl Phillips is the author of seventeen books of poetry, most recently Scattered Snows, to the North, and Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, which won the Pulitzer Prize. His other honours include the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. His collection, Silverchest, was shortlisted for the Griffin Poetry Prize in 2014. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently, My Trade is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing, and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.
Photo credit: Reston Allen
Judges’ Citation
Carl Phillips is a poet of the line and a poet of the sentence, both at once.
Carl Phillips is a poet of the line and a poet of the sentence, both at once. Rubbing these two intangible structures – one musical, the other linguistic – against one another is an ancient way of kindling verbal and intellectual fire, and Phillips does it in poem after poem with casual mastery. The lines are carved in low relief, shaped by internal assonance, not by end-rhyme, while the sentences trace a perfectly grammatical yet occasionally dizzying switchback trail, using the standard resources of prose to climb far beyond the prosaic domain. Phillips’s Silverchest consists in large part of reflections on a love affair gone bad. It is a gay male love affair in this case, but the anguish, the self-doubt, the sense of abandonment and loss, are captured here with a tenderness, depth, and precision that can dance through sociocultural fences as easily as deer can dance across the grass. Silverchest speaks, as great books do, out of its own profound particularity, to and for something wordless and shared by us all.
Selected poems
by Carl Phillips
In the east country where I must have lived once,
or how else remember it, the words came falling to
every side of me, words from a life that I’d thought,
if not easy, might at least be possible, though that
was then: little crown and little burst of arrows
and ritual, loyalty, they are not the same . . . I lay
rippling like a field shot through with amethyst
and reason. Then it seemed I myself was the field,
the words fell toward, then into me, each one no
sooner getting understood, than it touched the ground.
Copyright © 2013 by Carl Phillips, Silverchest, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
The Difference Between Power and Force
There’s a weed whose name I’ve meant all summer
to find out: in the heat of the day, dangling pods hardly
worth the noticing; in the night, blue flowers . . . It’s as if
a side of me that he’d forgotten had forced into the light,
briefly, a side of him that I’d never seen before, and now
I’ve seen it. It is hard to see anyone who has become
like your own body to you. And now I can’t forget.
Copyright © 2013 by Carl Phillips, Silverchest, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Just the Wind for a Sound, Softly
Sure, there’s a spell the leaves can make, shuddering,
and in their lying suddenly still again – flat, and still,
like time itself when it seems unexpectedly more
available, more to lose therefore, more to love, or
try to …
But to look up from the leaves, remember,
is a choice also, as if up from the shame of it all,
the promiscuity, the seeing-how-nothing-now-will-
save-you, up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you the way, lately, all
the branches seem to, or you like to say they do,
which is at least half of the way, isn’t it, toward
belief – whatever, in the end, belief
is … You can
look up, or you can close the eyes entirely, making
some of the world, for a moment, go away, but only
some of it, not the part about hurting others as the one
good answer to being hurt, and not the part that can
at first seem, understandably, a life in ruins, even if –
refusing ruin, because you
can refuse – you look
again, down the steep corridor of what’s just another
late winter afternoon, dark as night already, dark
the leaves and, darker still, the door that, each night,
you keep meaning to find again, having lost it, you had
only to touch it, just once, and it bloomed wide open …
Copyright © 2013 by Carl Phillips, Silverchest, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
My Meadow, My Twilight
Squalor of leaves. November. A lone
hornets’ nest. Paper wasps. Place where
everything that happens is as who says it will,
because. As in Why shouldn’t we have
come to this, why not, this far, this
close to
that below-zero where we almost
forget ourselves, rise at last unastonished
at the wreckery of it, what the wreckage
somedays can seem all along to have
been mostly, making you wonder what fear
is for, what prayer is, if not the first word
and not the last one either, if it changes
nothing of what you are still, black stars,
black
scars, crossing a field that you’ve
crossed before, holding on, tight, though
careful, for you must be careful, so easily
torn is the veil diminishment comes
down to as it lifts and falls, see it falling,
now it lifts again, why do we love, at all?
Copyright © 2013 by Carl Phillips, Silverchest, Farrar, Straus and Giroux