The Rest of Love: Poems (Hardcover)

by Carl Phillips (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Furthering an idiom worked up over six previous books and showing no signs of exhaustion, Phillips delivers another brittle, electric set of poems on love, sex, masculinity and their classical contours. In 33 lyrics divided over three sections, Phillips's unmistakable, short-lined apostrophes, riddled with exhalative em-dashes and pulled-up-short interrogatives, perform the kind of personal control that, before The Tether, would have been a main component of domination, but has slowly modulated into conscious attempts at sharing one's physical and psychic lives fully-or as fully as possible: "to what extent can this be said, and/ it be true? and/ it be false?/ Under what conditions?// Under whose conditions?" Phillips finds a series of images, from "White Dog" ("First snow-I release her into it") to a donkey in Santiago ("He shot the ass/ in the head. Simple.") to "the boy at the bow" of a sculling crew ("the rest of the boys/ sang back"), and works each singly and satisfyingly. And as with Phillips's other recent work, while the poems do not form a series, they seem to provide multiple and overlapping accounts of the title's excess (or its repose) without trying to define it. The result will not only please fans, but will send new readers back to recent books, which may be accumulating more quickly than they can be absorbed.
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From Booklist
Phillips is an intensely philosophical poet whose restrained lexicon is steeped in classical allusions and Elizabethan tropes. In his seventh rarefied and metaphysical collection, one that features his signature stark landscapes and brooding eroticism, this recent recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature ponders the tension between love, belief, and reason. Phillips' narrator dreams of God; cherishes light, resistance, stillness, and "things invisible"; perceives solitude as a force of nature; and recognizes the unsettling fact that everything contains its opposite. Phillips' restrained and abstract lyrics are elegant, enigmatic, and electric, provocative meditations on and enactments of what is "a human need, / to give to shapelessness / a form." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 80 pages
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 1st edition (February 14, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0374249539
• ISBN-13: 978-0374249533
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,231,076 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyable even where Phillips has done better earlier, January 10, 2005

By	Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Rest of Love: Poems (Paperback)

THE REST OF LOVE is a the work of a man possessed, a man who literally cannot stop writing. Now the famous Pulitzer Prize author describes and outlines a whole new set of tests and questions, kind of like a proctor of poetry, sitting up at the front of the class with an all-watchful eye. For nothing escape the notice of Carl Phillips. Here he is on the pilgrimage of St James of Spain, "where we/ stopped to bathe, and/ / for the first time/ saw him naked--/ one tattoo: a deer, gutted,/ pinned in what he called/ your standard/ Christ-on-the-cross position,/ / by which, it seems now, he meant in/ no way a thing/ unholy." By the time I get to the end of that I'm all sixes and sevens and wondering if "meant" is a transitive verb or not. "By which he meant in no way a thing unholy." I take it that the man's naked body reveals something of the godlike about it, even with its ugly tattoo of a gutted deer. Perhaps these tattoos are bigger in the high Castilian Spain of Compostela than they are in PETA-friendly California where I read the poem? Or does the poem indicate that the nude man has not been blasphemous about Christ on the cross? It's a fabulous riddle, and it's thrust into the middle of a poem in which the donkey is shot and a spray of indigo and sweetleaf is thrust into the bullet hole--again, as if to say, my life is a bit more brutal than yours and I am far from an academic poet but almost a big game hunter of barnyard animals. So it's confusing.

Nevertheless you come away from the book wondering if perhaps we are getting pummeled, as though with BB shot, by these powerful poems too often nowadays and maybe Mr. Phillips should take a break and not release so many books, though I understand the impulse to strike while the iron is hot for tomorrow, you may be outdated like John Masefield or someone, and ditto the impulse to take down what the Vates dictate to you. For if you are not receptive to the words of the poem, they will go somewhere else entirely.

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful, February 14, 2008

By	Jenna-Rose Ascherl - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Everyone has differing opinions as to what makes good poetry. This book, to me, is one of the best poetic discourses on love I have ever read. The problem with writing over love today is the overuse of stock images, metaphors, etc. Only a true poet could take the most cliched emotion and make it into something unique and beautiful. That is what Carl Phillips does. For instance, he takes a very simple act -- that of a lover handing over a shirt "after" -- and uniquely morphs it into something extremely tender and touching...but also with a little hint of an underlying sinister tone. He explores the complexities and implications within the act.

I highly recommend this book. I've enjoyed his other works as well, but so far, I find this one to be the best.

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Carl Phillips has not won a Pulitzer Prize., February 14, 2006

By	A Careful Reader - See all my reviews

Carl Phillips did not win a Pulitzer Prize.