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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.


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