A masterful new collection by one of our most important contemporary lyric poetsWind as a face gone red with blowing,oceans whose end is broken stitchery—swim of sea-dragon, dolphin,shimmer-and-coil, invitation. . . . You Knowthe kind of map I mean. Countries asdistant 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...

A powerful, inventive collection from one of America's most critically admired poets"What has restlessness been for?" In Wild Is the Wind, Carl Phillips reflects on love as depicted in the jazz standard for which the book is named—love at once restless, reckless, and yet desired for its potential to bring stability. In the process, he pitches estrangement against communion, examines the past as history versus the past as memory, and reflects on the past's capacity both to teach and to mislead us—also to make us hesitate in the face of love, given the loss and damage that are, often enough, love's fallout. How "to say no to despair"? How to take perhaps that greatest risk, the risk of believing in what offers no guarantee? These poems that, in their wedding of the philosophical, meditative, and lyric modes, mark a new stage in Phillips's remarkable work, stand as further proof that "if Carl Phillips had not come onto the scene, we...