Speak Low Poems [Paperback]

Speak Lowis the tenth book from one of America's most distinctiveand one of poetry's most essentialcontemporary voices. Phillips has long been hailed for work provocative in its candor, uncompromising in its inquiry, and at once rigorous and innovative in its attention to craft. Over the course of nine critically acclaimed collections, he has generated a sustained meditation on the restless and ever-shifting myth of human identity. Desire and loss, mastery and subjugation, belief and doubt, sex, animal instinct, human reason: these are among the lenses through which Phillips examines what it means to be that most bewildering, irresolvable conundrum, a human being in the world.

These new poems are of a piece with Phillips's previous work in their characteristic clarity and originality of thought, in their unsparing approach to morality and psychology, and in both the strength and startling flexibility of their line.Speak Lowis the record of a powerful vision that, in its illumination of the human condition, has established itself as a necessary step toward our understanding of who we are in the twenty-first century.

Speak Lowis a 2009 National Book Award Finalist for Poetry.

Carl Phillipsis the author of nine previous books of poems, includingQuiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 19862006;Riding Westward; andThe Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Theme and style join perfectly inSpeak Low. . . In poem after poem, the speaker turns to address questions of power. The style of the poems, as they frame and shape these questions, feels at once pliant and masterful . . . As in Rilke, Phillips' lines give his language a near-sculptural form, something like a fountain. The poems are structures of alternating firmness and give, as the sense spills from line to line. Jenny Mueller,St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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