


Other poems by Carl Phillips in Verse Daily: He teaches at Washington University in St. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022) and he has translated the Philoctetes of Sophocles (Oxford University Press, 2004). Other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Today's poem is "Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors"Ĭarl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, and Carcanet/UK, 2022) and Wild Is the Wind (FSG, 2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.Verse Daily: About Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips ® Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia. Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures.

The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the WarĬarl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest” Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader.
