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"What has restlessness been for?"
In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named - love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past's capacity both to teach and to mislead us - also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love's fallout. How "to say no to despair"? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee?
These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips's remarkable work, stand as further proof that "if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we would have needed to invent him. His idiosyncratic style, his innovative method, and his unique voice are essential steps in the evolution of the craft" (Judith Kitchen, The Georgia Review).
"Starred Review. Skillfully balancing philosophical discourse and linguistic pleasure, Phillips's much-admired capacity for nimble syntax unfurls like a sail, "each time, more surely." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. Registering these distinctions in life takes the same rapt attention that Phillips's compact, cerebral poems require, so that we can find all his gemlike observations." - Library Journal
This information about Wild Is the Wind was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Carl Phillips is the author of more than a dozen books of poetry, including Reconnaissance, winner of the PEN Poetry Award and the Lambda Literary Award, and Double Shadow, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.
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