In the follow-up to his Pulitzer Prize–winning collection, Then the War: And Selected Poems, poet and Washington University professor Carl Phillips turns his attention inward to themes of memory, perceived reality, love, and human nature.
Scattered Snows, to the North, out August 6 from Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is a slim collection of 33 poems divided into three sections: Somewhere It’s Still Summer, Rehearsal, and When We Get There. Across the verses, Phillips primarily explores the human mind—its ability to retain, to distort, and to interpret—by borrowing imagery from nature, history, and relationships.
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The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” evokes the Roman Empire (apt for the trained classicist) to affirm for readers that, despite the turning of the ages, people have always felt deeply. They have always loved, and lost, and cared for. “But there were people, of course, too,” he writes. “Most of them destined to be unremembered, who filled in their drawn lives anyway—because what else is there?—to where the edges gave out. If it was night, they lit fires, presumably. Tears were tears.”
Taken as a whole, Scattered Snows is a contemplative, solemn collection. But there are moments of intimacy and warmth that remind us that, among the feelings that are hardest to process, there is also joy, love, and beauty.
