Based on the conviction that only translators who write poetry themselves can properly re-create the celebrated and timeless tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the Greek Tragedy in New Translations series offers new translations that go beyond the literal meaning of the Greek in order to evoke the poetry of the originals. Under the general editorship of Peter Burian and Alan Shapiro, each volume includes a critical introduction, commentary on the text, full stage directions, and a glossary of the mythical and geographical references in the play. En route to fight the Trojan War, the Greek army has abandoned Philoctetes, after the smell of his festering wound, mysteriously received from a snakebite at a shrine on a small island off Lemnos, makes it unbearable to keep him on ship. Ten years later, an oracle makes it clear that the war cannot be won without the assistance of Philoctetes and his famous bow, inherited from Hercules himself. Philoctetes focuses on the attempt of Neoptolemus and the hero Odysseus to persuade the bowman to sail with them to Troy. First, though, they must assuage his bitterness over having been abandoned, and then win his trust. But how should they do this--through trickery, or with the truth? To what extent do the ends justify the means? To what degree should personal integrity be compromised for the sake of public duty? These are among the questions that Sophocles puts forward in this, one of his most morally complex and penetrating plays.

Philoctetes (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

Literature & Fiction

PHILLIPS, CARL

SOPHOCLES

Dramas & Plays

Oxford University Press

My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture\n“A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers.”—Diego Báez, Booklist\nIn these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an “apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered.” Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community.\nIn the tradition of Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips’s book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Yale University Press

An invaluable companion for any writer seeking to make the writing life a more complex and cooperative venture "Illuminating, deeply endearing essays."--Ron Charles, Washington Post &nbsp; "A lovely, loving letter to aspiring writers."--Diego Báez, Booklist &nbsp; In these intimate and eloquent meditations, the award-winning poet Carl Phillips shares lessons he has learned about the writing life, an "apprenticeship to what can never fully be mastered." Drawing on forty years of teaching and mentoring emerging writers, he weaves his experiences as a poet with the necessary survival skills, including ambition, stamina, silence, politics, practice, audience, and community. &nbsp; In the tradition of Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, and Marcus Aurelius's Meditations, this is an invaluable companion for writers at every stage of their journey. Phillips's book serves as a partner in speculation and an invitation to embrace mystery.

A stunning new collection of poems from the author of Speak Low
Comparing any human life to "a restless choir" of impulses variously in conflict and at peace with one another, Carl Phillips, in his eleventh book, examines the double shadow that a life casts forth: "now risk, and now / faintheartedness." In poems that both embody and inhabit this double shadow, risk and faintheartedness prove to have the power equally to rescue us from ourselves and to destroy us. Spare, haunted, and haunting, yet not without hope, Double Shadow argues for life as a wilderness through which there's only the questing forward―with no regrets and no looking back.
Double Shadow is a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award for Poetry Winner of the 2011 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry
A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011

Double Shadow: Poems

Poetry

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems

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.

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most respected poets There's a trembling inside the both of us, there's a trembling, inside us both. The territory of Reconnaissance is one where morals threaten to become merely "what the light falls through," "suffering [seems] in fact for nothing," and "all we do is maybe all we can do." In the face of this, Carl Phillips, reconsidering and unraveling what we think we know, maps out the contours of a world in revision, where truth lies captured at one moment and at the next goes free, transformed. These are poems of searing beauty, lit by hope and shadowed by it, from a poet whose work "reinstates the possibility of finding meaning in a world that is forever ready to revoke the sources of meaning in our lives" (Jonathan Farmer, Slate).

Reconnaissance: Poems

The light, for as far as I can see, is that of any number of late afternoons I remember still: how the light seemed a bell; how it seemed I'd been living insider it, waiting - I'd heard all about that one clear note it gives. --from "Late Apollo III" In The Rest of Love, his seventh book, Carl Phillips examines the conflict between belief and disbelief, and our will to believe: Aren't we always trying, Phillips asks, to contain or to stave off facing up to, even briefly, the hard truths we're nevertheless attracted to? Phillips's signature terse line and syntax enact this constant tension between abandon and control; following his impeccable interior logic, "passionately austere" (Rita Dove, The Washington Post Book World), Phillips plumbs the myths we make and return to in the name of desire--physical, emotional, and spiritual.

The Rest of Love: Poems

Riding Westward: Poems

The singer turning thisand that way, as if watching the song itself--the words to the song--leave him, as helets each go, the wind carrying most of it,some of the words, falling, settling intoinstead that larger darkness, where the smallerdarknesses that our lives were lie softly down."--from "Riding Westward"What happens when the world as we've known it becomes divided, when the mind becomes less able--or less willing--to distinguish reality from what is desired? In Riding Westward, Carl Phillips wields his celebrated gifts for syntax and imagery that are unmistakably his own--speculative, athletic, immediate--as he confronts moral crisis. What is the difference, he asks, between good and evil, cruelty and instruction, risk and trust? Against the backdrop of the natural world, Phillips pitches the restlessness of what it means to be human, as he at once deepens and extends a meditation on that space where the forces of will and imagination collide with sexual and moral conduct.

A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poets Wind as a face gone red with blowing, oceans whose end is broken stitchery-- swim of sea-dragon, dolphin, shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Know the kind of map I mean. Countries as distant as they are believable . . . --from "Halo" Carl Phillips lyric explorations of longing and devotion, castigation and mercy, are unrivaled in contemporary poetry. Here, in his sixth book, Phillips visits those spaces, both physical and psychological, where risk and safety coincide, and considers what it might mean to live at the nexus of the two. Sifting among the upturned evidence of crisis, from Roman Empire to westward expansion, from the turn of a lover's face to the harbor of the book's title--a place of calm fashioned of the very rock that can mean disaster--these poems negotiate and map out the impulse toward rescue and away from it. Phillips's pooling, cascading lines are the unsuppressed routes across his unique poetic landscape, daring and seductive in their readiness to drift and reverse as the terrain demands.

Rock Harbor

Silverchest: Poems

"After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely―not with judgment but with understanding―and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway―why not / in color?"

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PHILLIPS, CARL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by PHILLIPS, CARL

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by PHILLIPS, CARL. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Philoctetes (Greek Tragedy in New Translations)

My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing

Double Shadow: Poems

Pale Colors in a Tall Field: Poems

Reconnaissance: Poems

The Rest of Love: Poems

Riding Westward: Poems

Rock Harbor

Silverchest: Poems