Pastoral

by Carl Phillips

Overview

"Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts. Their affinity with John Donne is apparent, as they range from the mystical to the erotic. A third intensity is their devotion to language; Mr. Phillips writes with an almost whispered, at times almost unbearable elegance, as he reveals and declares some of the innermost truths of the human heart."

Judges' Citation

1998 National Book Awards for From the Devotions

"'Come back, come back. Tell us of excess' pleads the invocation (from Duncan) opening this stunning new collection from Carl Phillips. And indeed barely contained excess does function as a tutelary deity to this brilliant Romance: the poet questing for searing (even blinding) vision in a demotic world; the poet as seeker of moral instruction through the outrage of flesh.... Desire— erotic and spiritual— courses passionately through this collection— the strict shape desire inflicts on the chaos desire lets loose. But Phillips addresses not only passion, but art, history, nature: all in his hands forms of wanting. His rhythms beautifully and powerfully various— sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant— he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes."

Jorie Graham

The author of three previous books of poetry— From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood— Carl Phillips has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555972981
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/02/2002
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

The author of three previous books of poetry— From the Devotions, Cortège, and In the Blood— Carl Phillips has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress, and has been a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

    A Kind of Meadow

— shored
by trees at its far ending,
as is the way in moral tales:

whether trees as trees actually,
for their shadow and what
inside of it

hides, threatens, calls to;
or as ever-wavering conscience,
cloaked now, and called Chorus;

or, between these, whatever
falls upon the rippling and measurable,
but none to measure it, thin

fabric of this stands for.
A kind of meadow, and then
trees — many, assembled, a wood

therefore. Through the wood
the worn
path, emblematic of Much

Trespass: Halt. Who goes there?
A kind of meadow, where it ends
begin trees, from whose twinning

of late light and the already underway
darkness you were expecting perhaps
the stag to step forward, to make

of its twelve-pointed antlers
the branching foreground to a backdrop
all branches;

or you wanted the usual
bird to break cover at that angle
at which wings catch entirely

what light's left,
so that for once the bird isn't miracle
at all, but the simplicity of patience

and a good hand assembling: first
the thin bones, now in careful
rows the feathers, like fretwork,

now the brush, for the laying-on
ofsheen.... As is always the way,
you tell yourself, in

poems — Yes, always,
until you have gone there,
and gone there, "into the

field," vowing Only until
there's nothing more
I want — thinking it, wrongly,

a thing attainable, any real end
to wanting, and that it is close, and that
it is likely, how will you not

this time catch hold of it: flashing,
flesh at once

lit and lightless, a way
out, the one dappled way, back —

Chapter Two

    Clay

The shape of any thing
is the shape a line makes
around it.

So whatever my body can recall
of another's hands —
hard, spent upon it.

So whatever fossil
— a feather, a fern —
slate surrounds.

If there can be one, the shape
of any line
is its direction.

Shape, direction: the crosstrees.
That point where the two
cross has been narrative,

history — our story.
When did I choose
The Flesh, Wanting?

* * *

    — In Pompeii, it took ash to preserve the struggle against ash.

    Abundance

Not just the body — be it
as wild loam; as the loom with never a lack
of willing, schooled-enough

hands; or as steady
burning-glass beneath which, smoldering at
last, ah, give up.

But whatever bird, also,
bearing some equally whatever and now
irretrievable small life

where is home. The lip
too, that in its casual meeting with the glass
whose silvered rim

here is faded, here flakes, here
is gone,
meets all the other lips that once knew

and drank from the same glass —
an erotics
of cooled distance, all that history

has been, all that memory
is....
Remember the buck, stepping free

of the dark wood,
of the wood's shadow, as if
just for you? And the antlers, you said simply,

branching like hands or
like trees.
I thought of the branching of mistake when,

presumed over,
forgotten,
on all sides at once it sports a fist

full of blooms.

What you must call the blooms,
call them. Prayers; these willed disclosures —

    Clap of Thunder

Drove out to find one, found
instead a man single-fingering me
toward him.

              Every stranger
is an envoy of Fate's
court — not to receive whom....

I followed. And — There,

'tis done with.

To return to the car,
to drive back to
home as I remembered it, what
else but these,

the unextraordinary motions
that define the life
we most live — we
are, most of us, mere context.

And then I stepped inside
of weeping.

And then my hands found,
classically,
my brow,
the usual pose adopted for

disbelief when one believes
that one has failed, has

failed one's art.

You will have seen how a sudden
wind shakes down
from the tree twice picked-over

still some last, lingering fruit, gone
ignored, or unsuspected.
Just so. — I began writing.

    Dearest Won

Soon, I suspect, I shall be done with
the dove, and the steep rescue its wings
once, in storied flight unfolding, meant

promise of. Confess — if I grow used,
now, to a life all jazz-less blow and drag
of storm, it was not always so: before

I'd crossed a lover's trust, only to learn
I did not mind it; before I'd broken —
not a heart, but that as-yet deviceless,

still-apt-at-knee-to-buckle child that,
having looked every elsewhere, we turn
at last to the heart's winded field and

find, by a first snow amused, amazed,
finally — bewildered. In the scant,
hypnotic stagger to which here, in

the glowing walls of illumination, all
walking is shorn down, I need make
room for no one, with the exception of

my lately familiar but, for all that, no
less esteemed consort: praise. Though
restive as leaves, ever busy sustaining

then spilling the next brilliance, I shall
look to none to be lifted, evenings when
it is all I have wanted: to lie hollowed

out, crowned, gifted, and as pale ... as
pale as — if damage could have flesh —
that flesh would be. In truth, regret, I

am like damage; be sure: I do not fail.

    Study, between Colors

Now, everything comes
simple. Ladder, for
the reaching of what proves

hard to get to.
Dropcloth, guarantee
against — whatever falls.

You might have said.
The views, from this room,
are narrow, but go

far, I can see
not only the usual
lives careering towards end,

but some — haven't you
stood here? didn't you find
me among them? — some

more deliberately than others,
steeped in excess
of dull-headedness, or will,

or what for years I have
called hunger, as — as I
call it song,

what the doves in eaves
lately grow fat on, swell,
the way waves do except

never breaking,
they fly like
waves never....

I know —
You are blameless.
Earlier, how the sun through

no design of its own cast
seeming shrouds
on the floor's wood —

it passed, as the light
passes. The world is
sometimes that clean:

whom could I have
pointed to,
or what, and called thief?

    Parable

There was a saint once,
he had but to ring across
water a small bell, all

manner of fish
rose, as answer, he was
that holy, persuasive,

both, or the fish
perhaps merely
hungry, their bodies

a-shimmer with
that hope especially that
hunger brings, whatever

the reason, the fish
coming unassigned, in
schools coming

into the saint's hand and,
instead of getting,
becoming food.

I have thought, since, of
your body — as I first came
to know it, how it still

can be, with mine,
sometimes. I think on
that immediate and last gesture

of the fish leaving water
for flesh, for guarantee
they will die, and I cannot

rest on what to call it.
Not generosity, or
a blindness, trust, brute

stupidity. Not the soul
distracted from its natural
prayer, which is attention,

for in the story they are
paying attention. They
lose themselves eyes open.

    "All art ..."

Routinely the sea,
unbuckling, outswells
the frame it will

return to, be
held restively
by.

If there is a shadow
now, on the water, if
there are several,

somewhere are those that must
cast them, they will not
stay,

what does?
Our bodies, it turns out,
are not flutes, it

is unlikely that
God is a mouth with nothing
better to do than

push a wind
out, across us,
but we are human,

flawed therefore and,
therefore, shall suit ourselves:
Music

Hard Master
I called out,
Undo me, at last

understanding how
gift, any difficult
knot is — by

fingers, time, patience —
undone, knowing
too the blade by which

— if it means
the best, the most fruit — oh,
let the limbs be cut back.

    Unbeautiful

Not blond not
well-fashioned not cut
from the enviably

blue silks, imagine, that
medieval fingers stitched into
streamers to be — by hands more fair, at

races — waved, to say La, let
this horse win,

let that one,

La,

* * *

as in Siena, where she
is treacherous — the course — a steep
bowl; the one thing sure: that

some of the horses will die,
or — broken now, and
wingless — be made to,

as the cobbled stones, bucketed,
hosed clean of blood, will
again shine.

Not any of these. More,

Table of Contents

I
A Kind of Meadow	3
II
Clay	7
Abundance	8
Clap of Thunder	10
Dearest Won	12
Study, between Colors	13
Parable	15
"All art ..."	17
Unbeautiful	19
Hymn	22
The Gods Leaving	24
Black Box	25
Lay Me Down	27
Against His Quitting the Torn Field	29
III
And Fitful Memories of Pan	35
IV
Afterword	45
Autumn. A Mixed Music	47
Of That City, the Heart	49
Wanted	51
Would-Be Everlasting	52
Billet-Doux	53
A Fountain	56
Animal	58
Portage	60
Hour of Dusk	62
Gesture, Possibly Archaic	64
Retreat	65
V
The Kill	73
Notes	77

Editorial Reviews

Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts. Their affinity with John Donne is apparent, as they range from the mystical to the erotic. A third intensity is their devotion to language; Mr. Phillips writes with an almost whispered, at times almost unbearable elegance, as he reveals and declares some of the innermost truths of the human heart.” —Judges' Citation, 1998 National Book Awards for From the Devotions

“'Come back, come back. Tell us of excess' pleads the invocation (from Duncan) opening this stunning new collection from Carl Phillips. And indeed barely contained excess does function as a tutelary deity to this brilliant Romance: the poet questing for searing (even blinding) vision in a demotic world; the poet as seeker of moral instruction through the outrage of flesh.... Desire— erotic and spiritual— courses passionately through this collection— the strict shape desire inflicts on the chaos desire lets loose. But Phillips addresses not only passion, but art, history, nature: all in his hands forms of wanting. His rhythms beautifully and powerfully various— sinewy, majestic, casual, adamant— he modulates from honesty to honesty like no one else; both trusts and beautifully second-guesses appearances with an accuracy that moves and amazes.” —Jorie Graham

From the Publisher

Carnal Prayers

Prayer and the body are the two big themes rippling through Pastoral, Carl Phillips's new book of luminous, questioning poems. Trained in classical Greek and Latin, Phillips seems to excavate as he forms words into lines, breaking images into tiny parts of thought as he digs for meaning and accuracy.

As part of this excavation, Pastoral explores what flesh, wanting, and belief are made of. A finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Phillips has produced four collections of accomplished verse in the past few years. In each book, the influence of classical syntax and rhythm can be heard. And with each book, Phillips refines his poetic voice, combining the prayerlike and the erotic, and often elegantly swooping from a whisper to a scream in the space of a few stanzas.

This time, the poems fall along a wide range of tones, from italicized commands like "Let me" and "Now" in the poem "Lay Me Down" to a hesitant question, or a deepening well of self-doubt. Phillips is always original, and he's always remembering, even when a poem is firmly written in present tense. He is hyperaware not only of the ancient poets, but also of history, especially the great destructions.

In the ominously titled "The Kill," he remembers a familiar daily scene. The speaker analyzes his own love for another in clinical detail that suddenly veers into longing. The way these lines break adds to the sense of tragic fragment, of an ache:

      The last time I gave my body up,

      to you, I was minded
      briefly what it is made of,
      what yours is, that

      I'd forgotten, the flesh
      which always
      I hold in plenty no

      little sorrow for because -- oh, do
      but think on its predicament,
      and weep.

In just four stanzas, Phillips moves from an image of both love and surrender to a consideration of temporality -- the bald fact that his lover is mortal. This thought of "its predicament" makes him weep, even though death is not a stated issue here.

In "The Kill," the last poem in the volume, the speaker anticipates the need to remember. The second poem in the book referred to Pompeii, and the shadow of Pompeii is still resonant as the speaker describes his lover's body, still current and alive despite the title's warning.

He remembers a body he has felt before, and probably will feel again -- judging by the present tense of "what yours is." And yet, the speaker here feels the need to freeze that body in time, to memorialize it. The next stanza explains this strong urge to hold on:

      We cleave most entirely
      to what most we fear
      losing. We fear loss

      because we understand
      the fact of it, its largeness, its
      utter indifference to whether

      we do, or don't,
      ignore it.

The "largeness" of loss is what these poems are loath to accept, even as they seek to understand. Each poem tries to break loss down into questions, confessions, prayers, or simple expressions of doubt. While the poems fight against death and inevitable loss, they also seem to seek moral guidance to help with these losses.

Nowhere is the search for answers and guidance more apparent than at the endings of these poems, which are frequently questions. Phillips is fond of abrupt, mysterious dashes as conclusions. In his quest for a moral compass, he also quotes from "Lamentations" and draws on familiar Biblical stories. The wanderings of Cain, for example, seem to appear in the backgrounds of poems where man seeks. What's more, the epigraph is from George Herbert, the great poet of faith and the war between faith and flesh.

The sense of struggle between opposing ideas is something Phillips incorporates and modernizes into a contemporary parable of carnal love and constant questioning of that love. There's a frequent seesawing in the book, a back-and-forth on the big questions that permeates even the simplest narrative. For example, in "Favor," the second section of a five-part poem called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips sees a man in the distance:

      Even from a distance, I can tell:
      a man, clearly.
      Gods cast no shadow.

The struggle between man and God, between flesh and faith, is hinted at in the first stanza. Man, for Phillips, is an instrument of struggle, a tortured wanderer. The poem continues:

      Also, that he tires,
      stops to rest, looks like

      sleeping, or could use some.
      How long he has been,
      coming, how long it takes, just

      to cross it, the lush
      measure that -- all summer -- has

      been these well-groomed,
      well-fed grounds, the lake
      unswum and gleaming, the light

      catching, losing
      the useless extravagance

Phillips basically forms the scene of a man walking into a discussion of man's temporality, the fact that man tires. While what God makes -- "the lake unswum and gleaming" -- needs to make no effort to be beautiful, man exhausts himself just surviving. By the last two stanzas, the speaker concludes that the body must make bets with itself:

      Always, the body

      wagering --
      up, through itself --
      Give. What he wants, he shall have.

In Phillips's work, man -- though mortal -- still has great power. Man can demand, man can inspire love, and man can pray. In the struggle between man and God, in that constant "wagering," man sometimes wins.

&3151;Aviya Kushner

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