or
Sign in to turn on 1-Click ordering
More Buying Choices
Have one to sell? Sell yours here
Tell the Publisher!
I'd like to read this book on Kindle

Don't have a Kindle? Get your Kindle here, or download a FREE Kindle Reading App.
Sorry, this item is not available in
Image not available for
Color:
Image not available

To view this video download Flash Player

 

Pastoral: Poems [Paperback]

Carl Phillips
4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)

List Price: $14.00
Price: $12.31 & FREE Shipping on orders over $25. Details
You Save: $1.69 (12%)
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o
Only 3 left in stock (more on the way).
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com. Gift-wrap available.
Want it Friday, June 21? Choose One-Day Shipping at checkout. Details
Summer Reading
Summer Reading
Browse the best books of summer including blockbusters, beach reads, and editors' picks in our Summer Reading Store.

Book Description

March 2, 2002
In his newest book, National Book Award finalist Carl Phillips creates a shadowy inner landscape where the field is the heart, and the heart itself has a beautifully, often treacherously flawed darkness that each of us seeks to penetrate, believing in the possibility of light. Examining how to fill and fulfill the life granted us--how to realize the self entirely, and in time--these rhythmically sequenced meditations circle the predicaments of our longing against the backdrop of pastoral tradition. How do we balance control and abandonment when making poetry, as well as in making a life with another person? How do we reconcile fleshly desire and spiritual intention? Tightly coherent, emotionally nuanced, Pastoral both enlarges and defines Phillips's already impressive poetic territory.

Frequently Bought Together

Pastoral: Poems + Double Shadow: Poems + Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Art and Life of Poetry
Price for all three: $36.73

Buy the selected items together


Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

"When I think of desire,/ it is in the same way that I do// God: as parable, any steep/ and blue water, things that are always/ there, they only wait// to be sounded." The lyric sounding of human feeling against desire, the natural world and religious striving has been reenvisioned by Phillips over three books, including last year's NBA-finalist From the Devotions. In this brilliant fourth collection, foreboding fields and roaming creatures ("mouths gaped not/ in song but for those night-flying// insects that now, but too early, too/ readily, ascend") continue to echo the sorrow, alienation and eros of bodily existence. The fragmented diction and structure in poems such as "Unbeautiful" are contrasted by the dazzling "Hymn," written in the poet's classically slim tercets and singing to "...one more of many other nights/ figured with the inevitably/ black car, again the stranger's// strange room entered not for prayer/ but for striking prayer's attitude, the body// kneeling, bending, until it finds/ the muscled pattern that predictably, given strain and// release, flesh assumes." At the collection's center is the five-part lyric sequence "And Fitful Memories of Pan," in which Phillips's tireless attention to the body finds the god's hands are "shaped by damage, fitted/ for it." The collection's last poem, "The Kill," ends with the speaker-as-hunter: "one animal at attack,/ the other--the other one/ suffering, and love would// out all suffering." This cautiously hopeful note suggests less a reconciliation than a giving over of the self to encounter, one where the poet's various concerns come together beautifully. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

The author of three previous collections, Phillips (Washington Univ.) has received prizes and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Library of Congress. He was among the finalists for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Its tempting to make the comparison between his work and that of the so-called metaphysical poets, such as John Donne, because Phillips draws deeply from the traditions of mysticism and eroticismor at least sensualitywhich inform the metaphysicists worldview. But there the similarity begins and ends. The poems here are formed of more jagged and elemental observations than those to which Donnes refined metalogic gave careful shape. These seem more haphazard, more an amalgam of like fragments, less cohesive than adhesive. Their rhythms are staccato, hesitant, reinforcing the impression of intense flashes stitched together, of stanzas that veer on their predecessors tangents rather than guiding to the conclusion of an argument crafted line by line. And, whereas Donne joined his lovers mystically through the agent of the flea that mingles their blood, Phillips suggests spiritual intimacy through the image of pairs of lips that meet at different times on the rim of a drinking glass. Yet he does prove himself capable of more than merely casual insights into the human condition. Hes honest in his approach, admitting our essential frailty in wanting to outwit our fates, because he realizes that giving up the illusion would require us to also give up hope. At times the verses are tender and sensual, almost languid in their pacing, but at others its as if we're tuned to the poets staticky mental radio while bouncing down a logging road. -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Product Details

  • Paperback: 96 pages
  • Publisher: Graywolf Press; 1 edition (March 2, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 1555972985
  • ISBN-13: 978-1555972981
  • Product Dimensions: 59.8 x 0.3 x 89.4 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
  • Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,512,125 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of 9 previous books of poems, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006; Riding Westward; and The Rest of Love, a National Book Award Finalist. His most recent collection, Speak Low, is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars
(1)
4.0 out of 5 stars
5 star
0
3 star
0
2 star
0
1 star
0
Share your thoughts with other customers
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
0 of 2 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars phillips is rather good May 28, 2008
Format:Paperback
i love this line by carl phillips, "iliadic, vulnerable, the nipples." so vivid and memorable. don't know which book that's from.
Comment | 
Was this review helpful to you?
Search Customer Reviews
Only search this product's reviews

What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?


Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store

If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store. Learn more

Forums

There are no discussions about this product yet.
Be the first to discuss this product with the community.
Start a new discussion
Topic:
First post:
Prompts for sign-in
 


Listmania!


So You'd Like to...


Create a guide


Look for Similar Items by Category