![\"carl-phillips-poem.jpg\"](\"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-content\/uploads\/2009\/04\/carl-phillips-poem.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\nEqually, the black lake that the skiff sails across,
\nand the skiff also. Wingbeat. A belief in evil
\nhaving not yet displaced entirely a belief in the power
\nto turn evil away. Laughter. Any number of small
\nvoices in a field unfolding. Patterns like the one
\nwhere arrogance leads to shame, shame to anger,
\nuntil from anger—via the suffering called loss, called<\/p>\ngrieving for it: at last, compassion. Hoofbeat. Bluegrass.
\nPersuasion slowly brushstroking its way back into
\nwhat had seemed the world. A shadow prowling
\nthe not-so-clear-anymore perimeter of Who says so?<\/i>
\nA single mother-of-pearl stud catching parts of the light—
\nfor now, holding them. Troy is burning. Let us
\nmake of what’s left a sturdiness we can use to the end.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\nSpeak Low<\/i><\/a> is the tenth collection of poems by Carl Phillips, and the first since the publication of Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006<\/i> two years ago. The reference to Troy is just the slightest of many classical allusions in the book—no surprise there, since Phillips majored in Greek and Latin at Harvard and went on to get a master’s in the classical humanities from UMass-Amherst. “The themes that haunt Greek tragedy in particular—those moments when the personal conflicts with what is socially expected of the individual—have turned out to be very much what I am interested in writing about: the flexibility of morality, or perhaps its slipperiness,” Phillips has said<\/a>. “As for the relevance of classical authors to life and literature today, they wrote about love, death, morality, fear, mortality—these are surely very much a part of contemporary life, given that they are key parts to being a human being.”<\/p>\n
Other poems from Speak Low<\/i> include “Porcelain<\/a>” and “Naming the Stars<\/a>.” There’s also “Cloud Country<\/a>,” which you can hear Phillips reading. Meanwhile, just a week ago, The New Yorker<\/i> published a new Phillips poem, “Civilization<\/a>.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Equally, the black lake that the skiff sails across, and the skiff also. Wingbeat. A belief in evil having not yet displaced entirely a belief in the power to turn evil away. Laughter. Any number of small voices in a field unfolding. Patterns like the one where arrogance leads to shame, shame to anger, until […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/beatrice.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}