Wild Is the Wind: Poems

About this book

Winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A powerful inventive collection from one of Americas most critically admired poets 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 namedlove 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 pasts capacity both to teach and to mislead usalso to make us hesitate in the face of love given the loss and damage that are often enough loves 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 Phillipss 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).