Boy (The Vqr Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Patrick Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Series: The VQR Poetry Series | Publication Date: March 1, 2008

This second collection, a follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut, navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as he struggles to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. This second collection from Kate Tufts Award–winner Phillips (Chattahoochee) is haunted by memories, could-have-beens and what-ifs, as when an infant son dies instead of recovering from a fever, or never even makes it through birth. Phillips is consumed with his vulnerability as a parent and finds himself lost in the cyclical recurrences of time: What happened never happened on its own/ the future and the past collide. Fatherhood, of course, also recalls mixed memories of being a son. Phillips enacts the anxiety and grief of the knowledge that there is no escape from death, no matter how much we may love and protect someone. It will be the past/ and we'll live there together the final poem begins; it ends: It will be the past/ and it will last forever. (Apr.)
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Review

In sparse, deft, and elegant language, Phillips's remarkable second book of poems, Boy, places the poet midway between the lives of his parents and the lives of his children, where 'the endless dream / of childhood' has given way to the reality that 'whole human beings / sprang from us.' From this vantage point, he celebrates the wonderful simultaneity of experience that allows him to be, all at once, father, son, and boy. --Michael Collier, author of Dark Wild Realm

"Phillips' vibrant, witty, and elegiac collection chronicles the terrors and everyday joys of what it means to be a father, while at the same time creating a moving link to one's ancestors." --Dylan Foley, The Star-Ledger

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820331198
• ISBN-13: 978-0820331195
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #487,674 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

PATRICK PHILLIPS' second book, Boy, was published by University of Georgia Press in 2008. His first, Chattahoochee, won the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has received support from Yaddo, MacDowell, and the U.S. Fulbright Commission, and is a National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in 2009. He teaches at Drew University.