“Night’s Shadow-Grove of Losses”: A Review of Carl Phillips’ Pale Colors in a Tall Field

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Cover of book, "Pale Colors in a Tall Field" by Carl Phillips

In The Art of Description: World into Word, poet and essayist Mark Doty demonstrates how Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Fish” “[tracks] the pathways of [the poet’s] scrutiny.” Bishop herself likened the process to the baroque sermons of John Donne, an attempt “to dramatize the mind in action rather than in repose.” I returned to this notion again and again while reading the prolific and remarkably…

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Quarantine Academy—Dear Lovely Students:

in Poetry on Share
6 images of a whale breaching and summering, arranged chronologically in a grid

A mash up of 90-plus letters to my students in emails and a daily blog during COVID-19 school closures Well, this is it, it is Tuesday, and we are not going to school. This is the first day.  Surreal headlines and government announcements. Puzzles selling out, as everyone hunkers down.  I’ve been reading cancelation policies. My friend is walking his goats. The white pygmy’s name…

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Two Poems

in Poetry on Share
image of split rail fence crossing meadow with forest in the background

Fences We built fences along the spine of the Blue Ridge, bore through the shale deposits like a fist invading the sovereignty of someone’s nose. We sweated through our heat-faded shirts, turned tawny and blistered in the sun, swung hammers the way I imagine the first ape to wield a limb felt just before it struck some other lumbering biped who up until then had…

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