Riding Westward: Poems

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. . The singer turning this and that way as if watching the song itself--the words to the song--leave him as helets each go the wind carrying most of itsome of the words falling settling intoinstead that larger darkness where the smaller. darknesses that our lives were lie softly down.--from Riding Westward. What happens when the world as weve known it becomes divided when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? What is the difference Phillips 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.