Annal:2002 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award in the year 2002. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
The Tether: Poems
- 2002 Kingsley Tufts winner
- Score: 10.52
As I understand it, I could
call him. Though it would help,
it is not required that I give him
a name first. Also, nothing
says he stops, then, or must turn.
—from “The Figure, the Boundary, the Light”
In the art of falconry, during training the tether between the gloved fist and the raptor’s anklets is gradually lengthened and eventually unnecessary. In these new lyric poems, Carl Phillips considers the substance of connection—between lover and beloved, mind and body, talon and perch—and ts the cable of mutual trust between soaring figure and shadowed ground.
Contemporary literature can perhaps claim no poetry more clearly allegorical than that of Carl Phillips, whose four collections have turned frequently to nature, myth, and history for illustration; still, readers know the primary attributes of his work to be its physicality, grace, and disarming honesty about desire and faith. In The Tether, his fifth book, Phillips’s characteristically cascading poetic line is leaner and more dramatic than ever.”
