Carl Phillips was born In 1959.  As of 2011 Phillips has authored 10 books of poetry, including two which were finalist for the National Book Award.

Phillips is also the recipient of the  Academy of American Poets Fellowship, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pushcart Prize, the Academy of American Poets Prize, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress.

According to the Judges' Citation for the 1998 National Book Awards, "Carl Phillips' passionate and lyrical poems read like prayers, with a prayer's hesitations, its desire to be utterly accurate, its occasional flowing outbursts."

Phillips is Professor of English and of African and Afro-American Studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also teaches in the Creative Writing Program. He was elected an Academy Chancellor in 2006.

This biography was excerpted, in part from, Academy of American Poets, Poets.org

 

 

Double Shadow: Poems
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Hardcover: 80 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (March 15, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374141576
ISBN-13: 978-0374141578
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.6 inches

Phillips' book of poetry is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award

A stunning new collection of poems from the author of Speak Low

Comparing any human life to “a restless choir” of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: “now risk, and now / faintheartedness.” In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there’s only the questing forward—with no regrets and no looking back.

 

Speak Low: Poems
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Hardcover: 80 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (March 31, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374267162
ISBN-13: 978-0374267162
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.5 inches

Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America’s most distinctive—and one of poetry’s most essential—contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

These new poems are of a piece with Phillips’s previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

 

Riding Westward: Poems
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Hardcover: 64 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (April 18, 2006)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374250030
ISBN-13: 978-0374250034
Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces

What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

The singer turning thisand that way, as if watching the song itself
--the words to the song--leave him, as he
lets each go, the wind carrying most of it,
some of the words, falling, settling into
instead that larger darkness, where the smaller

darknesses that our lives were lie softly down."
--from "Riding Westward"

 

Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
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Paperback: 224 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (May 1, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374530785
ISBN-13: 978-0374530785
Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.8 inches

Quiver of Arrows is a generous gathering from Carl Phillips's work that showcases the twenty-year evolution of one of America's most distinctive--and one of poetry's most essential--contemporary voices. Hailed from the beginning of his career for a poetry provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft, Phillips has in the course of eight critically acclaimed collections generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

Phillips's sensibility as he questions morality, psychology, and our notions of responsibility is as startlingly original as the poems themselves, whose exacting standards for the line's flexibility and whose argument for a versatile, more muscular syntax bring to American poetry "something not unlike a new musical scale" (The Miami Herald). Quiver of Arrows is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

 

The Rest of Love: Poems
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Paperback: 80 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (December 23, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374529620
ISBN-13: 978-0374529628
Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.3 inches

This collection won the Theodore Roethke Memorial Foundation Poetry Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Male Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Striking new poems from a writer whose "lyric gift . . . outstrips all diversionary maneuvers." (Carol Moldaw, The Antioch Review)

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"

In The 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 Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire-physical, emotional, and spiritual.

 

Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry
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Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (June 1, 2004)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555974015
ISBN-13: 978-1555974015
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.1 x 0.8 inches

The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essays

The "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that for any culture most holds value. In art, as in life, the poet Carl Phillips argues, that currency includes beauty, risk, and authority-values of meaning and complexity that all too often go disregarded. Together, these essays become an invaluable statement for the necessary-and necessarily difficult-work of the  

 

Rock Harbor
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Hardcover: 128 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (September 1, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374251401
ISBN-13: 978-0374251406
Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 0.6 inches

A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poets

Wind as a face gone red with blowing,
oceans whose end is broken stitchery--

swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,
shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Know
the kind of map I mean. Countries as

distant as they are believable . . .

--from "Halo"

Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.

Here, in his sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.

 

Cortège: Poems
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Paperback: 72 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (March 25, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555972306
ISBN-13: 978-1555972301
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches


(From the Back Cover)

Priase for Cortège

"Carl Phillips is a poet of eros, but for him eros isn't simply sex, or even sexual desire sublimated into social ritual, or art, or any of the overdetermined ploys by which all of us, men and women, heterosexual and homosexual, attempt to close the distance between ourselves and others. Rather, eros is the never ending struggle, as he puts it, 'to fill a space in so there's no room left for awhile for what he surely calls a suffering inside him.' In the intricacies of thinking and feeling enacted in every poem of Cortège, no feeling ever quite escapes its opposite--the joy of fulfilled desire is infused with the isolation it has momentarily eclipsed, the heaven of intimacy only heightens 'how it feels to be stranded.' Cortège is a book that has been packed in salt: the durable salt of artistic making, and the bitter salt of longing. Few other poets writing today can track so well, so unforgettably, the estranging spaces in the heart of love, the perils of beauty or the beauty of peril."--Alan Shapiro

"Out so much farther than our present pieties, attentive to no social or sentimental voice, only passion's (so often ruinous, defiant of upshot), it is not in every case, every poem, that Carl Phillips triumphs over my timidity. As with Sappho and Pasolini, though, traces of the winged god are everywhere unmistakable, even when this new poet has kicked them over: it is a sacred entail his harsh graces make. I for one am an awed (if lacerated) heir."--Richard Howard

 

The Tether: Poems
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Paperback: 96 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (April 3, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0374528454
ISBN-13: 978-0374528454
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches

Graceful and resonant new work by a lyric poet at the height of his skill.

As I understand it, I could
call him. Though it would help,
it is not required that I give him
a name first. Also, nothing
says he stops, then, or must turn.
--from "The Figure, the Boundary, the Light"

In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor's anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection -- between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch -- and ts the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground.

Contemporary literature can perhaps claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips's characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever."

 

Pastoral: Poems
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Paperback: 74 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press; 1 edition (March 2, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555972985
ISBN-13: 978-1555972981
Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches

In his newest book, National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips creates a shadowy inner landscape where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully, often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us seeks to penetrate, believing in the possibility of light. Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us--how to realize the self entirely, and in time--these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry, as well as in making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent, emotionally nuanced, Pastoral both enlarges and defines Phillips's already impressive poetic territory.

 

From the Devotions: Poems
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Paperback: 82 pages
Publisher: Graywolf Press (March 2, 2002)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1555972632
ISBN-13: 978-1555972639
Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches

From the Back Cover
With From the Devotions, Carl Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul--ever restless--come explosively together. Speaking to a balance between decorum and pain, he offers here a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or the organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, the poet is the listener, the mourner, the one who has some access to the maddening quarters of human consciousness, the wry Sibyl. From the Devotions is deeply felt, highly intelligent, and unsentimental, and cements Phillips's reputation as a poet of enormous talent and depth.

"In his extraordinary new book of poems, From the Devotions, by far his best, Carl Phillips has done what few of his contemporaries have dared or managed with as much elegant authority. He has plotted here the romantic landscape of desire. Myths are unsheathed and glisten. History is held and pondered. Violence shimmers, desires are silhouetted against the light of love and death. His tone is at once erotic and mystical, hushed and compelling. This book is a blessing, a ravishing, a haunting. I urge you to read it--to succumb to it."--J.D. McClatchy