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Scattered Snows, to the North

Carl Phillips

Cover of Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips
10% off all versions
Categories: 21st Century, American, BAME
Imprint: Carcanet Poetry
Publisher: Carcanet Press
Available as:
Paperback (72 pages)
(Pub. Aug 2024)
9781800174337
£11.99 £10.79
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(Pub. Aug 2024)
9781800174344
£9.59 £8.63
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  • Description
  • Author
  • Awards
  • Reviews
  • Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024
    A New York Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024

    Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past. If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition – 'tears were tears', mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty. 'Yet the world's still so beautiful... Sometimes it is...' It was enough. And it still can be.

    Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020, Phillips's first UK publication, won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. His most recent prose book is My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). Phillips lives on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
    Carl Phillips is the author of 16 books of poetry, most recently Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 (Carcanet, 2022), which won the 2023 Pulitzer Prize. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing (Yale University Press, 2022). ... read more
    Awards won by Carl Phillips Short-listed, 2024 The T.S. Eliot Prize (Scattered Snows, to the North) Winner, 2023 The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
    (Then the War)
     'These wise poems often begin by locating us in a real landscape - a wood, a riverbank - and somehow that landscape stays real even after we've learnt it's merely conjured from his imagination, a metaphor for a feeling that cannot be put into words any other way. And his syntax is a thing of wonder - swerving, doubting, correcting itself, unspooling clause after clause over several stanzas, in counterpoint to his careful line-breaks.'

    Tristram Fane Saunders, The Telegraph
    'Scattered Snows, to the North is a bold and complex collection, and Phillips risks much both in its soul-baring intimacy and vulnerability, at once personal ... yet also moving much beyond the simple confessional. ... This is an important book, and there is much to learn, to attend to, to linger over, and to take pleasure from these 'songs... built from things too difficult to speak of'. So risk it--accept that challenge.'

    Gail Low, Imagined Spaces
     'A beautiful book... There's a constant slippage between the tenor and the vehicle of metaphors, such that objects of abstract comparison feel as real as the real.'

    Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
    'Quietly breath-taking. Phillips seems to be mulling over life's great questions by interrogating (or glancing sideways at) memory, relationships, encounters, and nature. Perhaps language itself is the closest we have to an ungraspable, beautiful truth.'

    Ian Humphreys, The Poetry Society
     'Phillips is a classicist-poet in the vein of Hopkins, whose instruction by Hill offered a language of devotion that he could apply toward desire, love, and contemplation. His myriad devotions--€”to nature, to sex, and to truth--are no less prayerful than those of religious believers. The result is a poet whose work carries sublimity and timelessness, and whose syntax carries an ancient strangeness and heft.'

    Nick Ripatrazone, Poetry Foundation
    'This is the best that poetry offers -€“ earthly but not earthbound, self-aware yet never self-indulgent, philosophical but with a firm awareness of emotional puzzlement. Phillips has an unparalleled gift for teasing out the peculiarity of grammar and syntax; his breath-long, branching lines move in an unpredictable pattern that keeps our hearts stopping and racing. Open-minded, erudite and deeply moving, this book of love and memory will withstand years of rereading.'

    Kit Fan, The Guardian
    'Perhaps no poet has sought so hard and so long, in such a variety of grammatical forms, for ways to depict such familiar situations - a hookup, a breakup, a wish to turn back time.'

    Stephanie Burt, The New York Times

    'In Carl Phillips's ravishing new collection, the elegiacal vision, still haunted by an erotics of loss has become enraptured with belatedness... in sinuous complexes of metaphor that revive experiences through the glamour, renegade, melancholy, of their ruins.'

    David Woo, LitHub


    Praise for Carl Phillips
    'Then the War, is a forest-like network of linguistic relationships... ideas are turned over at different angles and that way gather complexity and momentum. Phillips operates in an altogether superior league.'

    Carol Rumens, The Poetry Review  

    'A welcome collection of earlier and new work by an unusually far-reaching poetic explorer.'

    Carol Rumens, The Guardian where 'For Nothing Tender About It' was Poem of the Week

    '...a poet whose art is among the best representations we have of the modern mind in all its wonder and melancholy uncertainty.'

    Jesse Nathan, McSweeneys

    'Phillip's is a poet of enchantment and persuasion... [his] poems are contemplative, rich, and troubled...a rich exploration of reality and imagination, of making art out of memories and making memories out of art.'

    Richie Hoffman, LA Review of Books 

    'The 208 pages form a wonderfully compendious introduction to this major US poet. For those who have admired his work in the three decades since his debut, they are glowing confirmation that, as he enters his 60s, Phillips is writing better than ever ... a single project of the utmost immediacy.'

    Fiona Sampson, The Guardian 

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