Customer Reviews

The Centaur's Son: Stories

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This book is one of storytelling's finest. Each short is a voyage that does not last long enough. I travel to each place Daughtry has been to - Ireland, Brazil, Belize, among many - and I return reluctantly. Days later, an image from one of his stories manifests in my head, and, having become so much a part of me, I can't remember if it is one of my own, if I was the one who made that trip, who nursed the dove back to life, who communed with wild horses, and who surrendered to the jaguar within. It can't be someone else's story, I think, it must be my own, because reading Philip Daughtry's work is like looking inward to a place where everything real and human and eternal is kept - safe. And when you find that safe place, you are grateful that it is there, and that he is its keeper. He is vulnerable, he is strong, he is everything we all are, unabashedly human, and loving, and seeking to be loved. Read this book and taste the salt in a soft ocean breeze.

I love this book! This fine collection of short stories carries me to places that are familiar yet amazingly fresh and real. His sense of poetic awareness, much like the early beats makes the stories come alive. Reading the stories is like a travel log for an adventurer. I couldn't put the book down. What a jem!

"The Centaur's Son" is a stunning collection, from the author's poetic, pulsing style to the dark wisdom at its core. It seems to me to be a contemporary "On the Road" unfolding in a world where traveling far afield is much easier than in Kerouac's era, but where finding strands of connection is by far more elusive and dangerous. It's as though the author measures and records the dimensions of human life by placing his characters, one by one, against the world's various settings. Against these backdrops, the inner workings of the psyche, with its fill of desire, humor, fear, failure, pride, greed, meet face to face with nature and the locals ways of doing things. In the process, the characters are opened, stripped, reshaped. Daughtry's stories, taken together, remind me of the venerable Zen saying which observes that it isn't the self that confirms the world; in fact, it's the world that advances and confirms the self. This book shows us readers the intimate workings of the advancing world.

Philip Daughtry is a lyrical Shaman. His humanism is filled with magic, healing and joy, just what the world needs now!

Ever hear someone say, "I don't know how to describe it..."
Wel, it wasn't Philip Daughtry, because this is one author who has the chops to lay out a story with such eloquence and richness that you very well may end up seeing places you thought you knew, as if for the first time.

In his book, The Centaurs' Son, the author takes us on a whirlwind tour through parts of Europe, Mexico, the Western United States, and a handful of other destinations where we meet memorable and authentic characters all along the way.

We hack our path through the bush of Belize where we have a Shamanistic exchange with a jungle cat. In Ireland, we are a party to the distribution of a special sort of contraband bound to piss off the Pope.
We witness a funeral service for a mouse in Finland and we have a voyeuristic front row seat as our hero loses it in Paris to an enchanting Gallic Siren.

For those destinations new to the reader, Daughtry lends us his sharpened senses and artistic sensibilities, emersing us in the local flavors and customs with a ripping narrative style that keeps us fully engaged throughout.

This is great fun but not of the frivolous kind. It is a volume I intend to visit often for its beauty and stirring insights.

I began reading Philip Daughtry's "The Centaur's Son: Stories" on a plane from LA to New York and I soon became upset that I would be landing before I finished it. Having read it now I can say that I recommend it highly. Daughtry writes easily and meditatively in a voice that few writers are able- a first person who rarely breaks the (oft-ignored) basic rule of writing- show, don't tell. With the exception of a few wonderful third person stories most are told in this powerful fashion, and the effect as a reader is to be drawn in- to share the body of the storyteller, so that what he sees, you see, and what he feels, you feel. I felt cold, awed, lonely, and grateful watching a line of moose cross a foreign road in the snow. I felt an adrenalized fear as one narrator successfully approached an unbroken horse in the wild. It is because Daughtry's prose reflect the gait required to accomplish such a storied feat that he is so captivating. His sentences are at once careful and bold, both quiet and uninterrupted.

Out of many, these two eidetic images also reveal the insatiable desire in nearly all of Daughtry's characters (and I would assume, in Daughtry himself): that is, the desire to obliterate one's Self and be one with Nature. This human impossibility is discovered and experienced by the narrators (and reader) in ways comedic and tragic. For example, the innocent adventurer who approaches the horse is laughed at for his bravery, but the poet on the snowy road is humbled. All the same Daughtry's characters are immersed in their mission, they become their mission, just as his writing immerses me, becomes me, even many miles in the air. And even if a plane lands, or a writer must come home from his world explorations to find plastic red, white and blue cutlery (one of my favorite short-story-endings of all time) we are grateful for the trip, and grateful that Philip Daughtry is still trying to be immerse himself. I loved the book.

This book is filled with many great short stories but more importantly it's writing offers the reader an ability to see what the writer in this case Phillip Daughtry is writing and actually be there. When he writes about dust you feel the dust when he writes about a woman's curves you see them. It is really well done.