Rest of Love

By Carl Phillips

Book Overview

The light, for as far as I can see, is that of any number of late afternoons I remember still: how the light seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about that one clear note it gives. --from "Late Apollo III" InThe Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove,The Washington PostBook World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire--physical, emotional, and spiritual. Carl Phillipsis the author of several books of poems, includingRock Harbor,The Tether,Pastoral, andFrom the Devotions, the last of which was a finalist for the National Book Award and the recipient of a 2001 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. A Finalist for the National Book Award In his seventh book of verse, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe. Aren't we always trying, the poet asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control. Indeed, the poems inThe Rest of Lovealso plumb this very tension. Following his impeccable interior logic, always "passionately austere" (Rita Dove,The Washington Post Book World), Phillips explores the myths that we both create and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual. A Finalist for the National Book Award "[This latest book of poems by Phillips] will not only please fans, but will send new readers back to recent books."-Publishers Weekly "[Phillips achieves] a delicately cadenced music entirely his own."-Roger Gilbert,Michigan Quarterly Review "Phillips's line is elegant . . . [This is] a collection of carefully crafted poems."-Ira Sher,Poetry Magazine "InThe Rest of Love, Carl Phillips offers 33 lyrics that intricately explore the paradox implicit in his book's title: that love and desire reside in the constant tension between excess and repose, release and restraint. Phillips plumbs this tension with a supple lyric idiom. He often writes in tercets that spill, like a stepped waterfall, one into the other, a flow channelled in each tercet by brief lines laden with interrogatives and apostrophes and punctuated by commas and dashes. This baroque syntax coaxes to life images that pucker, bloom, and sprawl . . .The Rest of Loveis the scintillating record of a poet struggling to understand desire and to find a pattern of understanding within the struggle itself."-John Palatella,Newsday "Furthering an idiom worked up over six previous books and showing no signs of exhaustion, Phillips delivers another brittle, electric set of poems on love, sex, masculinity, and their classical contours. In 33 lyrics divided over three sections, Phillips's unmistakable, short-lined apostrophes, riddled with exhalative em-dashes and pulled-up-short interrogatives, perform the kind of personal control that, before [his book called]The Tether, would have been a main component of domination, but has slowly modulated into conscious attempts at sharing one's physical and psychic lives fully-or as fully as possibl

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374249539
• ISBN13: 9780374249533
• Release Date: February 2004
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
• Length: 70 Pages
• Weight: 0.47 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Carl Phillips has not won a Pulitzer Prize.

Carl Phillips did not win a Pulitzer Prize.

Enjoyable even where Phillips has done better earlier

THE REST OF LOVE is a the work of a man possessed, a man who literally cannot stop writing. Now the famous Pulitzer Prize author describes and outlines a whole new set of tests and questions, kind of like a proctor of poetry, sitting up at the front of the class with an all-watchful eye. For nothing escape the notice of Carl Phillips. Here he is on the pilgrimage of St James of Spain, "where we/ stopped to bathe, and/ / for the first time/ saw him naked--/ one tattoo: a deer, gutted,/ pinned in what he called/ your standard/ Christ-on-the-cross position,/ / by which, it seems now, he meant in/ no way a thing/ unholy." By the time I get to the end of that I'm all sixes and sevens and wondering if "meant" is a transitive verb or not. "By which he meant in no way a thing unholy." I take it that the man's naked body reveals something of the godlike about it, even with its ugly tattoo of a gutted deer. Perhaps these tattoos are bigger in the high Castilian Spain of Compostela than they are in PETA-friendly California where I read the poem? Or does the poem indicate that the nude man has not been blasphemous about Christ on the cross? It's a fabulous riddle, and it's thrust into the middle of a poem in which the donkey is shot and a spray of indigo and sweetleaf is thrust into the bullet hole--again, as if to say, my life is a bit more brutal than yours and I am far from an academic poet but almost a big game hunter of barnyard animals. So it's confusing. Nevertheless you come away from the book wondering if perhaps we are getting pummeled, as though with BB shot, by these powerful poems too often nowadays and maybe Mr. Phillips should take a break and not release so many books, though I understand the impulse to strike while the iron is hot for tomorrow, you may be outdated like John Masefield or someone, and ditto the impulse to take down what the Vates dictate to you. For if you are not receptive to the words of the poem, they will go somewhere else entirely.