Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems

By Carl Phillips

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America’s most critically acclaimed poets.

Carl Phillips’s new poetry collection, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, is a meditation on the intimacies of thought and body as forms of resistance. The poems are both timeless and timely, asking how we can ever truly know ourselves in the face of our own remembering and inevitable forgetting. Here, the poems metaphorically argue that memory is made up of various colors, with those most prominent moments in a life seeming more vivid, though the paler colors are never truly forgotten. The poems in Pale Colors in a Tall Field approach their points of view kaleidoscopically, enacting the self’s multiplicity and the difficult shifts required as our lives, in turn, shift. This is one of Phillips’s most tender, dynamic, and startling books yet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Mar 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9780374721428

Carl Phillips

Carl Phillips is the author of Speak Low, Double Shadow, Silverchest, Reconnaissance, Wild Is the Wild, Pale Colors in a Tall Field, Then the War: And Selected Poems, and several other works. He has been awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Kingsley Tufts Award, the Jackson Poetry Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.

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Pale Colors in a Tall Field by Carl Phillips

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He taketh my hand / in his

THE LAST OF FANFARE

—By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea?

Yes, he said. And: That’s perfect. And: Don’t stop.

Clouds moving behind leaves in front moving

ON BEING ASKED TO BE MORE SPECIFIC WHEN IT COMES TO LONGING

When the forest ended, so did the starflowers and wild

ginger that for so long had kept us

company, the clearing opened before us, a vast

meadow of silverrod, each stem briefly an

angled argument against despair, then only weeds by

a better name again, as incidental as

the backdrop the ocean made just

beyond the meadow … Like taking

a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might

more easily disperse, we’d at last reached the point

in twilight where twilight seems most

a bowl designed to turn routinely but

as if by accident half roughly

over: bells somewhere, the kind

of bells that, before being housed finally

in their towers, used to

have to be baptized, each was given—

to swing by or fall hushed inside of,

accordingly—its own name; bells, and then—

from the smudged edge of all that

seemed to be left of what we’d called

belief, once, bodies, not of hunting-birds, what

Reviews for Pale Colors in a Tall Field

[Tess Liberto · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It was okay. Not the best poetry but it is nice writing and a nice relaxing read