Riding Westward

Poems

Carl Phillips

Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks

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What happens when the world as we’ve known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able—or less willing—to distinguish reality from what is desired? In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own—speculative, athletic, immediate—as he confronts moral crisis. What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

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Erasure

Brindled, where what’s left of the light finds him, he cowers in front of me: one way, as I remember it, that a body having grown accustomed to receiving punishment expresses

receipt, or a readiness for it, or—wild, bewildered—the desire to.

Above us, the usual branches lift unprophetically or not, depending: now spears; now arrows. There’s a kind of tenderness that makes more tender

all it touches. There’s a need that ruins. Dark. The horse comes closer.

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Carl Phillips reads his poem "Island"

"Listen to this poetry reading to hear poet Carl Phillips read his poem ""Island,"" from his poetry collection Riding Westward. Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human. Learn more about the book Riding Westward at http://us.macmillan.com/ridingwestward/CarlPhillips Read more about poet Carl Phillips at http://us.macmillan.com/author/carlphillips"

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Praise for Riding Westward

“A master stylist . . . While Phillips’s ideas are complex . . .His images ground
us. ”—Library Journal
 
“The poems in Riding Westward ring like peals of a bell—recognizable, separate and yet merging together, radiating from a single source . . . Again Phillips strikes the theme of radiating realities, this time working inward from the largest darkness of all, which is implied, to the darkness of night, to the smaller darkness of one person’s remembered life. The cowboy’s song—as all the poems in Riding Westward—is a comforting lament.”—Aaron Belz, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Reviews from Goodreads

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Annette  rated it  
Mar 30, 2009
sigh. unbelievable. my favorite at the moment:


There’s a meadow I can’t stop coming back to, any
more than I can stop calling it a sacred grove—isn’t
that was it was, once? A lot of resonance, trees asway
with declarations whose traced-on-the-air patterns
the gra ...more
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Alisha  rated it  
Jul 1, 2007
Holy shit. And holy fuck. This is the kind of book where you can only read one poem at a time, They hit you that hard, they are that difficult to digest. Many of the poems are painful- it seems as if Philips is confessing faults or regrets of his own, which, somehow, threaten to expose your own faul ...more
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About the Author

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of eight previous books of poems, including The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist; Rock Harbor; and The Tether, winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

Carl Phillips

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Riding Westward
Poems
Carl Phillips

Trade Paperback

Trade Paperback
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Paperbacks
May 2007
Trade Paperback
ISBN: 9780374530822
ISBN10: 0374530823
6 x 9 inches, 64 pages
$12.00
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