Scattered Snows, to the North
The Pulitzer Prize For Poetry 2023
Carl Phillips's "Scattered Snows, to the North" is a collection aboutp 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 though 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.
Carl Phillips's "Scattered Snows, to the North" is a collection aboutp 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 though 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.
About the author
Carl Phillips is the author of fifteen previous books of poetry, most recently "Pale Colors in a Tall Field" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020) and "Wild Is the Wind" (FSG, 2018), which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Other honors include the 2021 Jackson Prize, the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, the Kingsley Tufts Award, a Lambda Literary Award, the PEN/USA Award for Poetry, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Library of Congress, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Academy of American Poets. Phillips has also written three prose books, most recently "My Trade Is Mystery: Seven Meditations from a Life in Writing" (Yale University Press, 2022); and he has translated the "Philoctetes of Sophocles" (Oxford University Press, 2004). He teaches at Washington University in St Louis.