From the Devotions (98 Edition)

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.

Carl Phillips is the author of nine previous books of poems, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006; Riding Westward; and The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis. National Book Award Finalist

Winner of a 2001 Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature

Named a Best Book of the Year by Publishers Weekly

Finalist for a GLBT Book Award from the American Library Association

The poems in From the Devotions take readers into a dangerous and mysterious terrain where body and soul, both ever restless, come explosively together.

In his own brilliant voice, equally marked by decorum and pain, Phillips offers a devotional poetry that argues for faith, even without the comforting gods or organized structures of revealed truth. Neither sage nor saint nor prophet, this acclaimed contemporary American 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 so offers further proof of Phillips's enormous poetic talent and depth.

These graceful, magical lyrics should confirm Phillips's well-deserved reputation for exploring the spaces, moods, and metamorphoses of desire. Gathering energy from forms like the alba, and a witty classicism apparent in his 'Renderings' of Anacreontic fragments, the poet arranges in his characteristically small, precious stanzas the gently persistent longings of the body, as in 'The Sybil, ' where he self-consciously contributes a 'third gate' through which dreams come: 'the flesh, what / cannot help but / fail, come bone // come shine.' Other poems pay homage to domesticity, and are populated with animals--deer, horses, bees, the luna moth--whose needs, hopes, and hungers are cleverly mapped onto the poet's own. Witness this from 'On Restraint': 'One would like nothing / more than to forget it all: how beautiful he was then, like a man, not a horse. / --but very like a horse, how he ran.' The last section moves from the gods of the living to the remains of the body in death, where Borges, Dante, Isaiah, and even fellow riders on 'The Flume' at an amusement park provide haunting devices, especially in the bitter, astounding title poem, through which flesh becomes ash.--Boston Review

Phillips shapes a compelling lyric truth from the partiality of devotion, from the devastating limits of physical and emotional relations, and from love.--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Carl Phillips offers a meditation on the place of devotion at the end of a century marked increasingly by failure and uncertainty. Challenging divinity (from Eros to Christ) and mining tradition (from ancient Greece to Donne), Phillips takes us even further into that dangerous space he has already made his own, where body and soul — ever restless — come explosively together.

The New Yorker said of Phillips's book Cortege, "To desire is not to have: this apparent truism pervades Phillips's poems, where the erotic is always lined with sadness.... The verse here is both poised and informal, literate and personal".