Rock Harbor: Poems

Wind as a face gone red with blowingoceans whose end is broken stitchery--. swim of sea-dragon dolphinshimmer-and-coil invitation. . . . You Knowthe kind of map I mean. Countries as. distant as they are believable . . .. --from Halo. Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion castigation and mercy are unrivaled in contemporary poetry.. In Rock Harbor his sixth book Phillips visits those spaces both physical and psychological where risk and safety coincide and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis from Roman Empire to westward expansion from the turn of a lovers face to the harbor of the books title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillipss pooling cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.