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    Speak Low: Poems
    Speak Low: Poems
    Speak Low: Poems
    Ebook67 pages37 minutes

    Speak Low: Poems

    By Carl Phillips

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    About this ebook

    Speak Low is the tenth book from one of America's most distinctive—and one of poetry's most essential—contemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

    These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line. Speak Low is the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

    Speak Low is a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateAug 26, 2014
    ISBN9781466878952
    Speak Low: Poems
    Author

    Carl Phillips

    Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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      Book preview

      Speak Low - Carl Phillips

      Speak Low

      The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly …

      The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also. The

      water in that sense was the wind’s reflection. The wind was,

      to the water, what the water was to the light that fell there,

      or appeared to fall, spilling as if the light were a liquid, or as

      if the light and the water it spilled across

                                                                              were now the same.

      It is true that the light, like the water, assumed the pattern of

      what acted upon it. But the water assumed also the shape

      of what contained it, while the light did not. The light seemed

      fugitive, a restiveness, the less-than-clear distance between

      everything we know we should do, and all the rest—all

      the rest that we do. Stirring, as the wind stirred it, the water

      was water—was a form of clarity itself, a window we’ve

      no sooner looked through than we’ve abandoned it for what

      lies past that: a view, and then what comes

                                                                                  into view, or might,

      if we watch patiently enough, steadily—so we believe, wishing

      for what, by now, even we can’t put a name to, but feel

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