© Columbia University Press
The Poetics of the Everyday: Creative Repetition in Modern American Verse
December, 2009
Cloth, 336 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-14930-3
$45.00
/ £31.00
"A compelling study of the function of “everyday time” in the works of Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, and James Merril. . . Recommended. " — Choice
"Siobhan Phillips is a first-rate analyst whose book is a model for any of its kind. Her prose offers a rare blend of concision, aesthetic sensitivity, and critical sophistication. Phillips says new things about such old chestnuts as 'Stopping by Woods,' makes a good case for relatively neglected works by Robert Frost and Elizabeth Bishop, and integrates such poems as James Merrill's 'Self-Portrait,' usually discussed in relative isolation, into a case about the whole of the poet's work. This book deserves wide appreciation, even beyond its take on these individual writers, for Phillips writes about poetry sensitively, synthetically, and with exemplary care." — Stephen Burt, Harvard University, author of The Forms of Youth: Twentieth-Century Poetry and Adolescence
"The everyday and the ordinary in twentieth-century poetry are not likely to find a more dedicated or intelligent interpreter than Siobhan Phillips. Her focus on the everyday makes possible fresh and valuable insights on each of the poets she encounters and on twentieth-century poetry in general." — Nick Halpern, author of Everyday and Prophetic: The Poetry of Lowell, Ammons, Merrill, and Rich