Anthology of Ideas

Easily missed, the epigraph by Danial Defoe to Carl Phillips’s book “Speak Low” seems to sum up the experience of reading Phillips: “and I could feel my self carried with a mighty Force and Swiftness towards the shore a very great Way.” Phillips’s poetry is all about the duality of existence as one seeks to find their own place and their own power. The feeling of being pulled by water in the epigraph endures, but one sees that the poems do not force a single definition and the inherent internal struggle within them allows one to see this pulling force of water as both helpful and harmful: the water is just as likely to pull one to shore as out to sea.

Easily missed, the epigraph by Danial Defoe to Carl Phillips’s book “Speak Low” seems to sum up the experience of reading Phillips: “and I could feel my self carried with a mighty Force and Swiftness towards the shore a very great Way.” Phillips’s poetry is all about the duality of existence as one seeks to find their own place and their own power. The feeling of being pulled by water in the epigraph endures, but one sees that the poems do not force a single definition and the inherent internal struggle within them allows one to see this pulling force of water as both helpful and harmful: the water is just as likely to pull one to shore as out to sea.