Synopses & Reviews
A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.
Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.
Review
"I read...Phillips’s books for the deepest pleasures poetry can provide — intelligence, linguistic chops, mystery. I also read them as primers, field guides, breviaries: as translations of personhood, in all our flawed and searching complexity." Lisa Russ Spaar, On the Seawall
Review
"Few poets can deliver such weight with such precision as Phillips...the type of writer to make us believe that, perhaps, poetry truly is the form in which story and song best breathe together." Nick Ripatrazone, The Millions
Review
"Phillips has the ability to be both enigmatic and reassuring in his work, always going past where you think the poem aims to go, and achieving something greater..." Aaron Robertson, Lit Hub
About the Author
Carl Phillips is the author of several books of poetry, including Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination. Phillips teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.