Wild Is the Wind
Poems
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically admired poets
“What has restlessness been for?”
In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past’s capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love’s fallout. How “to say no to despair”? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips’s remarkable work, stand as further proof that “if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft” (Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Phillips (Reconnaissance) hazards a visit to an emotional territory reminiscent of Dickinson's "wild nights" in his 14th collection, in which he faces the unavoidable question: "Don't you want to find happiness?" These 35 poems are as haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named, and the work coheres through images of the sea and navigation, compasses and charts. The possibility of love is a risk taken under the "bright points of a constellation missed earlier,/ and just now seen clearly: pain; indifference;/ torn trust; permission." The explorer must to "say no to despair." The nautical conceit merges seamlessly with Phillips's more familiar metaphorical terrain of earth and sky ("leaves swam the air"). He startles readers afresh with his talent for transcendent metaphor leavened by rueful humor "The oars of the ship called Late Forgiveness lift,/ then fall. The slaves at the oars/ have done singing it's pure work, now" and displays a well-honed ability to draw on varied literary sources in a register that's both academic and vernacular. As ever in his work, emotional dynamics resist easy resolution and the speakers unsparingly evaluate both the self and exterior world. Skillfully balancing philosophical discourse and linguistic pleasure, Phillips's much-admired capacity for nimble syntax unfurls like a sail, "each time, more surely."
