"For mostly, yes, we were silent - tired, as well, though as much out of boredom as for the need to stretch a bit, why not the rest on foot, we at last decided - and dismounting, each walked with his horse close beside him. We mapped our way north by the stars, old school, until there were no stars, just the weather of childhood, where it's snowing forever."
- from, Is It True All Legends Once Were Rumors

I hadn't read anything else by Carl Phillips before picking up this book for a craft class so I didn't know I was about to read some of the most gorgeous lines I have encountered. The voices he uses in this collection are tender, surprising, intuitive and nothing short of inspired. For me, he strikes the perfect balance between philosophical engagement and plain spoken diction. These poems can float but they don't start out that way, you hardly notice what is happening until suddenly a line lifts you high enough to see.

"...Some - the luckiest -/arrived at, then clung to, that point in love where/to be understood entirely stops being the main thing,/or a thing at all, even. They could let the nights unfurl/before them, one after the other, each a seemingly/vast underworld of damage they didn't have to talk about, not anymore, they agreed/it was there now, they hovered over it, what light there was/was their own."
-from On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching

My only quibble with this book is a selfish one. It is very slim: 52 pages. I wanted more than the 34 poems. Not that this volume is incomplete but that I just met a favorite poet and now I'm a little bit obsessed.