Pale Colors in a Tall Field
Poems
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.
Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The rich, ruminative 14th book from Phillips (Silverchest) begins midconversation: " By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea?" it asks as though imagining how someone would like to die. It ends with an affirmation of spring in "Defiance": "For by then all the lilies on the pond had opened." These poems, which are filled with longing and a sense of the poet wrestling with himself, are made up of reflections that frequently run over 10 or so of Phillips's signature long lines. He frequently alludes to water (the sea, a lake, waves, swimming) and juxtaposes memory and the body in resonant ways. His observations spring from probing mundane images ("say of the sea/ what you will, it's the shore that endures the routine loss") or by creating startling juxtapositions ("Like taking/ a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might/ more easily disperse"). "My trade is mystery" he notes in "The Same in Sun as It Felt in Shadow": "how/ all the more powerful parts to a life as to art,/ as well, when it's worth remembering / resist translation." While Phillips is enigmatic in these poems, he is never coy, conjuring a rich intellectual and felt life on the page for the reader.
