Scattered Snows, To The North

Resumen del libro

Shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2024A New York Times Poetry Book of the Year 2024Carl Phillips's Scattered Snows, to the North is a collection about distortion and revelation, about knowing and the unreliability of a knowledge that's rooted in (always unstable) human memory. If the poet's recent books have been engaged with the theme of power, this one focuses on vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus of releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past.

If we remember a thing, did it really happen? If we believe it didn't, does that make our belief true? In Scattered Snows, to the North, Phillips looks through the window of the past in order to understand the essential sameness of the human condition - 'tears were tears', mistakes were made and regretted or not regretted, and it mattered until it didn't, the way people live until they don't. And there was also joy. And beauty.