Wild Is the Wind: Poems

by Carl Phillips

Overview

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).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374538248
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	01/22/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	80
Sales rank:	1,132,972
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Reconnaissance, winner of the PEN Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Contents

Courtship 3

Swimming 4

Brothers in Arms 6

Meditation: On Being a Mystery to Oneself 8

Musculature 9

Givingly 10

The Distance and the Spoils 11

Not the Waves as They Make Their Way Forward 12

Gold Leaf 13

Several Birds in Hand but the Rest Go Free 14

Stray 15

Revolver 16

The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before 17

From a Bonfire 18

And Love You Too 20

What I See Is the Light Falling All Around Us 22

Black and Copper in a Crush of Flowers 23

If You Go Away 25

What the Lost Are For 27

Rockabye 28

His Master's Voice 29

That It Might Save, or Drown Them 30

Gently, Though, Gentle 32

The Wedding 33

More Tenderly Over Some of Us Than Others 35

The Way One Animal Trusts Another 36

A Stillness Between the Hunting and the Chase 38

Before the Leaves Turn Back 40

For It Felt Like Power 41

Craft and Vision 42

Crossing 43

Monomoy 44

If You Will, I Will 46

Wild Is the Wind 48

The Sea, the Forest 50

Notes and Acknowledgments 53

Editorial Reviews

"[Wild is the Wind is] as haunting and contemplative as the torch song for which the collection is named . . . [Phillips] startles readers afresh with his talent for transcendent metaphor leavened by rueful humor . . . Skillfully balancing philosophical discourse and linguistic pleasure, Phillips’s much-admired capacity for nimble syntax unfurls like a sail, 'each time, more surely.'" —Publishers Weekly, starred review

"Trying to write about this collection is a completely hopeless exercise . . . Everything I want to say about it sounds at least a little unhinged, as in: having read it, I can’t imagine not having read it; a copy of it never lasts long with me before I give it away to someone I love; it offers moments of clarity that I’ve never found anywhere else. So many of us have a book for which this is the case, and often—unsurprisingly often—this book was written by Carl Phillips."—Corinne Segal, Lit Hub

From the Publisher

★ 11/20/2017
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.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

★ 09/15/2017
In recent collections, two-time National Book Award finalist Phillips (Renaissance) has been preoccupied with the weight of the past, but here he surpasses melancholy to present moments of crucial rethinking. "I've pretty much/ been wrong," he says, and calmly, too, as he scans what has unfolded. Throughout, Phillips balances on the knife's edge of regret but doesn't cut himself, acknowledging that "accepting our position, and understanding it/ still mattered, but not like remembering what/ the point had been." It's just that grasping that point can be tricky. Memory is a "mirage of history" and history itself something that runs over us roughshod and obdurate. "What hasn't been damaged?" the poet reflects at one point, elsewhere observing, "The sea was one thing once; the field another. Either way, something got crossed, or didn't." Can we distinguish between what's happened and how it's recalled, between what's joyously starlike and merely bald-fact star? Does it all come to nothing (so different from "not knowing exactly what it's come to")? Registering these distinctions in life takes the same rapt attention that Phillips's compact, cerebral poems require, so that we can find all his gemlike observations. VERDICT Highly recommended.—Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Library Journal