Boy Poems [Paperback]

PATRICK PHILLIPS's first book, Chattahoochee, was selected by Alice Quinn, Robert Wrigley, and Robert Pinsky for the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award and also received a "Discovery"/The Nation Prize from the Unterberg Poetry Center. He has been a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Copenhagen, and his translations of the Danish poet Paul la Cour received the Sjoberg Translation Prize of the American-Scandinavian Foundation. He is currently an assistant professor of English at Drew University.This follow-up to Patrick Phillips's award-winning debut navigates the course of the male experience, and particularly young fatherhood. Like Virgil's Aeneas, the book's central figure is in the middle time of life, a grown man with an aging father on his shoulders and a young son at his hand. Phillips's plainspoken and moving lyrics add an important voice to the poetry of home as they struggle to reconcile fatherhood and boyhood, present and past, and the ache of loving what must be lost.

In sparse, deft, and elegant language, Phillips’s remarkable second book of poems, Boy, places the poet midway between the lives of his parents and the lives of his children, where 'the endless dream / of childhood' has given way to the reality that 'whole human beings / sprang from us.' From this vantage point, he celebrates the wonderful simultaneity of experience that allows him to be, all at once, father, son, man, and boy.

There are poets of domestic life and there are poets of the sublime, and Patrick Phillips is both. What is fascinating and deeply original in this conjunction is how Phillips unabashed lyricism conjures both the consolations of fatherhood and married love, and what Tomas Transtromer calls the deep—the dizzying sense of psychological and metaphysical gulfs plunging away beneath us at the very moment that our private lives seem most fulfilledlSÒ