Scattered Snows, to the North
Poems
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- USD 9.99
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- USD 9.99
Descripción editorial
An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.
Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that’s based on human memory. If the poet’s last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn’t, does that make our belief true?
In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition—“Tears / were tears,” mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn’t, the way people live until they don’t. And there was also joy. And beauty. “Yet the world’s still / so beautiful . . . Sometimes // it is . . .” And it was enough. And it still can be.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Phillips (Then the War) brings an increased awareness to endings in this elegant collection. "It's hard/ to believe in them,/ the beautiful colors/ of extinction," he writes in "Regime." Phillips has long been an exquisite navigator of the long sentence, and this capacity for meditation on the page is on full display, as is his flair for rendering thought through controlled syntax: "whereupon they began arguing, about language first,/ then about precision: resistance is only technically/ the same thing as hope." Dancing between beauty and catastrophe, he evokes desire and longing in the face of forces that threaten routine and survival: "Isn't every season,/ no matter what we call it, shadow season?" These poems strike poignant and enduring notes, suffused in "the split fruit of late fall," which "wears best when worn quietly." This is another poised addition to Phillips's dazzling body of work.
