Wind as a face gone red with blowing, oceans whose end is broken stitchery-- swim of sea-dragon, dolphin, shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Knowthe...

Wind as a face gone red with blowing,
oceans whose end is broken stitchery--

swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,
shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Know
the kind of map I mean. Countries as

distant as they are believable . . .

--from Halo

Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.

In Rock Harbor, his sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.

Author: Carl Phillips
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 09/08/2003
Pages: 128
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.43lbs
Size: 8.26h x 5.32w x 0.38d
ISBN: 9780374528850

About the Author

Carl Phillips is the author of seven books of poems, most recently Rock Harbor; The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award; and From the Devotions, a finalist for the National Book Award, and the recipient of an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 2001. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.