Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006
Phillips is a scholar and translator of classical Greek and a writer of syntactically complex, desire-drenched love poems that subtly, and beautifully, reinvent classical tropes and forms. Phillips has published eight books of his own poetry: this selection pares down a rapidly expanding oeuvre to its sharp essentials. Phillips's first three books, published by Graywolf, show him working out his relation to the tradition—from the Famous Black Poet to Yeats (I recognized/ something more/ than swan to Sappho (My tongue still remembers)—and to AIDS and its aftermath: I watched as each boat fell to flame:/VincentandMatthewand, last, what bore your name.Pastoral(2000) finds Phillips confidently making the tercet into a representation of the lover's body, a practice that has culminated in four subsequent books rapidly published in the '00s—includingThe TetherandThe Rest of Love—that contain extraordinary and strange examples of Phillips's trademark writing about the bonds and bounds of sex and couplehood: —Singing inside the mirror,/ to no one, to// itself, the body folding, and/ unfolding, as if map/ then shroud, its song.(May)Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.