Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.

What is a self? What is a memory?

In Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Carl Phillips argues for trust, tenderness, and an attentiveness to the intimacies of thought and body as their own quiet but no less powerful forms of resistance to a world of increasing distraction, noise, and skepticism. Against a canvas of remembering and forgetting, Phillips here treats point of view kaleidoscopically—to embody the self’s multiplicity and to enact the self’s constant shifting as the contexts of a life, in turn, shift. This is perhaps Phillips’s most powerful, meditative, and startling sequence of poems yet.