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. (Feb.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.
This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work. These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching-"like the rhyme between lost/ and most"-and a human urge to understand. He begins "The Difficulty": "It's as if the difficulty were less about what happened-/ the truth presumably-than how little/ what happened resembles the story/ of what happened." Often, he lays two ideas side by side as a way of exploring how beings (fathers, lovers, dogs, to name a few) affect one another: "what isn't love-at all-/ can begin to feel like love" ("Of California") "as if to be plundered meant at least not being alone" ("Among the Trees"). There is a deceptive looseness in Phillips's poems, which are conversational and intimate, heightening the poet's abiding concern with nuance.
Combining new and old poems from the last 13 years with sections of his lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," this selected offers admirers of Phillips's work a chance to revisit his masterful poems, and new readers an opportunity to see the evolution of a vital presence in American poetry.
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