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Poems
by Carl Phillips
An arresting study of memory, perception, and the human condition, from the Pulitzer Prize winner Carl Phillips.
Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowing that's based on human memory. If the poet's last few books have concerned themselves with power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the usefulness of embracing it and of releasing ourselves from the need to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true?
In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks though the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition―"Tears / were tears," mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. "Yet the world's still / so beautiful ... Sometimes // it is ..." And it was enough. And it still can be.
"These poems strike poignant and enduring notes, suffused in 'the split fruit of late fall,' which 'wears best when worn quietly.' This is another poised addition to Phillips's dazzling body of work." ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"Autumn and winter; aging and death; erotic desire, and our regret if it fades ... [Phillips] writes about those simplest, oldest things with a syntax so unpredictable, so elaborate, that they can seem almost new." ―Stephanie Burt, The New York Times Book Review
This information about Scattered Snows, to the North 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 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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People who bite the hand that feeds them usually lick the boot that kicks them
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