His work is about trying to find a clear path amid the confusion of everyday life. Instead, he describes his process as pushing forward with the mind into unknown areas. Yet, he does not write with a subject in mind. In Then the War, Phillips writes from the landscape of violence and conflict that has defined the past few years in the United States. “Those aren’t resolvable, but I write in order to make at least some temporary sense of what is always eluding us.” “I believe that poetry exists as a way of giving shape to what’s shapeless – for figuring out ways to grapple with the big abstract parts of life like love, death, morality, sex,” Phillips said. Phillips’ fifteenth book of poems, Then the War: and Selected Poems, 2007 – 2020, is emblematic of the endless nature of this work, looking forward and reflecting on past work at the same time. It is a quest that is no less meaningful for the fact its resolution is always just outside of our grasp. Then the War is luminous testimony to the power of self-reckoning and to Carl Phillips as an ever-changing, necessary voice in contemporary poetry.Carl Phillips, professor of English, tells his students that writing poetry is a quest to make sense out of the confounding. Ultimately, Phillips refuses pessimism, arguing for tenderness and human connection as profound forces for revolution and conjuring a spell against indifference and the easy escapes of nostalgia.

Then the War includes a generous selection of Phillips’s work from the previous thirteen years, as well as his recent lyric prose memoir, “Among the Trees,” and his chapbook, Star Map with Action Figures. The new poems, written in a time of rising racial conflict in the United States, with its attendant violence and uncertainty, find Phillips entering deeper into the landscape he has made his own: a forest of intimacy, queerness, and moral inquiry, where the farther we go, the more difficult it is to remember why or where we started. A new collection of poems from one of America’s most essential, celebrated, and enduring poets, Carl Phillips's Then the WarĬarl Phillips has aptly described his work as an “ongoing quest” Then the War is the next step in that meaningful process of self-discovery for both the poet and his reader.

Then the war carl phillips