Reviews
Phillips is a skillful poet of occasions, imitations, and pastiche, all offered up with a serious yet insouciant expression of 'I'll try this, too.'
A high-spirited mix of playfulness, memory and social observation.
Clear, direct, accessible, and frequently very funny, Robert Phillips' poems should be better known.
An originally and consistently entertaining poet. Robert Phillips's plainspoken eloquence provides a tonic for readers who find that much contemporary poetry has little to say to them.
Whether admiring Phillips's exceptional craftsmanship, enjoying the humor that infiltrates even his most serious poems, or warming to the deep humaneness of his spirit, a reader feels at home in this collection, and in good company.
Patients and Healers in the High Roman Empire is extremely readable, and I would recommend it most particularly to anyone seeking a brief introduction to several of the key debates in medical history for the period: the notion of the medical marketplace; the dichotomy (or, rather, absence thereof) between temple and secular medicine; the links between the spread of empire and that of physicians, medical ideas, and pharmacological ingredients.
Martyrs Mirror has shaped the Anabaptist tradition more powerfully than any book besides the Bible... Like its subject material, Weaver-Zercher’s book is both ambitious and impressive. It constitutes an overview-in-miniature of Anabaptist history. Weaver-Zercher’s book is the invaluable latest entry in this ongoing and highly contested debate. Just as some ministers recommend that van Braght’s text grace every household, Martyrs Mirror: A Social History belongs in the repertoire of all historically minded Anabaptists, a mirror from our troubled past onto this uncertain present.
All lines so veracious.
His work is engagingly open and accessible, his subjects painstakingly explored.
There is a wry, self-deprecating intimacy and charm in Robert Phillips' poems that are not like anyone else writing today.
Through all of the poems moves Mr. Phillips's inimitable voice—easy-going, spare, engaging, and inclined to comedy. Some of the richness comes from the equable telling of poignant or bitter things; it is like hearing depth charges in a calm sea.
Book Details
Acknowledgments
I. Fire & Obsession
The Ocean
Ghost Story
The Grown-up Train
An Empty Suit
Expulsion
The Snow Queen
Life Force
Homage: Neruda
Ode to a Banana
After Reading The Book of Questions
Variations on
Acknowledgments
I. Fire & Obsession
The Ocean
Ghost Story
The Grown-up Train
An Empty Suit
Expulsion
The Snow Queen
Life Force
Homage: Neruda
Ode to a Banana
After Reading The Book of Questions
Variations on Vallejo's "Black Stone on a White Stone"
Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire
Two Twentieth-Century American Monologues
Ted Bundy, Stalker Rapist
Texas Cheerleader Murder Plot
Famous Last Words
Endymion and Selene
My Funny Valentine
Two for Max Eberts
Blue Jay
Trees in Springtime
San Miguel de Allende
II. a little light music
Memory
Life and Limb
Headlines
Miss Perfecto
Response to Barbara Walters' Most Fatuous Question
Soliloquy of the Ethiopian Eunuch
III. rituals
Sunday Rituals
Two for Mister Roscoe
"Arsh Potatoes"
Grandfather's Cars
To a Schoolteacher Now Dead
Viewing
Two Sonnets
Her Life at Seven
Chance Encounter
Days of 1964
The Ruined Man
Bucolics
Mop and Nest
Wisteria and Fence
Insomnia
Twp Adaptations from Red Pine
Waiting for a Friend
Parting from a Friend on a Night in Spring
Christopher Isherwood
Vita