ABOUT THIS BOOK

Winner of the 2005 Kate Tufts Discovery Award.

From the author of Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America and the National Book Award finalist Elegy for a Broken Machine: Poems, here is the first collection from award-winning poet Patrick Phillips.

A river runs through Patrick Phillips’s collection Chattahoochee, and through a family saga as powerful and poignant as the landscape in which it unfolds. Here are tales of a vanished South, elegies for the lost, and glimpses of what Flannery O’Connor called the “action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” In language delicate and muscular, tender and raw-boned, Phillips writes of family, place, and that mythic conjunction of the two we call home.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Patrick Phillips has won a “Discovery” / The Nation Award from the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y, a Gulf Coast Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poems have appeared in Poetry, the New England Review, Agni, the Gettysburg Review, The Nation, Rivendell, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. A past Fulbright Fellow, he has held fellowships at the MacDowell and Millay colonies. He is currently a Henry Mitchell MacCracken Fellow at New York University. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.

REVIEWS

“The ‘intensity in the seeing’ that Theodore Roethke believed good poetry possessed is everywhere present in Patrick Phillips’s clear-eyed debut collection, Chattahoochee. The world Phillips evokes is a half-paradise of childhood innocence half-lost to the earthly imperfection of adult experience. It is a world illuminated by bright and dark fire, a world where awe and wonder find a voice, and where memory leads—by story, metaphor, and music—to the ‘oldest room in the house’ where, Phillips tells us, ‘the world began.’”—Michael Collier, author of The Ledge “The poems in Chattahoochee have clearly taken to heart W. C. Williams’s dictum that contact with the local is the only road to the universal and is finally the true measure of a work of art. Patrick Phillips’s depiction of the small town Georgia community in which he was raised is by turns harrowing and tender, full of communal warmth and racial hatred, family intimacy and social justice. That he doesn’t simplify his vision of the Southern world that formed him, that he honors his own ambivalence, is a measure of Phillips’s humane inclusive vision, an inclusiveness that keeps his keen sense of place from becoming mere regionalism; it’s what enables him to find a social and political history within the particulars of personal experience. This is an unforgettable first book.” —Alan Shapiro, author of Song and Dance: Poems

“The ‘intensity in the seeing’ that Theodore Roethke believed good poetry possessed is everywhere present in Patrick Phillips’s clear-eyed debut collection, Chattahoochee. The world Phillips evokes is a half-paradise of childhood innocence half-lost to the earthly imperfection of adult experience. It is a world illuminated by bright and dark fire, a world where awe and wonder find a voice, and where memory leads—by story, metaphor, and music—to the ‘oldest room in the house’ where, Phillips tells us, ‘the world began.’”

—Michael Collier, author of The Ledge

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents
The Doves	000
I
The Rules	000
My Lovely Assistant	000
To Fortune	000
Pictures of the Dead	000
The Chimney	000
Elegy Ending in a Dream	000
Blue Ridge Bestiary	000
The Doe	000
In the Museum of Your Last Day	000
Twelve Views of My Father	000
The Mussel	000
Baptism	000
II
Chattahoochee	000
III
To the Muse, from Way Downtown	000
My Father, Playing Tennis	000
Two Figures	000
Look	000
A Valediction	000
Ars Poetica: Hitting the Curve	000
Ars Videndi	000
Brass Knuckles	000
The Reptilian Ancestry of Birds	000
Masque for My Family	000
The Night	000
In Solitude	000
The Danaïd	000
My Brother, on Lake Lanier	000
The Flood	000




Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication:

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