<DIV><P><B>Carl Phillips</B> is the author of nine previous books of poems, including <I>Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006</I>;<I> Riding Westward</I>; and <I>The Rest of Love</I>, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at Washington University in St. Louis.</P></DIV> <DIV>This is the second collection of poems by Carl Phillips, whose first book, <i>In the Blood</i>, won the 1992 Morse Poetry Prize. As <i>The Boston Book Review</i> observed, <i>Cortege</i> is the work of "an erotic poet, one who follows his sexuality into surprising territory . . . The contemporary scene is fully present [throughout this book], with all its new and old terrors—AIDS, loneliness—but Phillips's richness of mind is such that he often encounters in this life the artifacts of a couple of millennia of art and mythology. Which is not to say these poems have an academic flavor—far from it. The vision is contemporary, the language ours . . . What makes these poems such a coherent whole, in addition to their open sensuality, is the awareness they contain of the inescapable sadness of beauty . . . This is a poet of tact and delicacy, with an understated approach to even potentially explosive subjects."<BR></div> <DIV>"A classicist by training, Phillips mythologizes the everyday as adeptly as he domesticates Ovid, and the verse [to be found in <i>Cortege</i>] is both poised and informal, literate and personal."—<b><i>The New Yorker</i></b><BR><BR>"<i>Cortege</i> is a book that has been packed in salt: the durable salt of artistic making and the bitter salt of longing."—<b><i>Alan Shapiro</i></b> <BR><BR>"The poems of James Merrill and Paul Monette come to mind as one reads Phillips's second collection. Here is a poet who writes with the same masterly elegance, often enhanced by tight, three-line stanzas. References to Ovid, Dante, or Renaissance painting are as lyrical as his frequent descriptions of shadows and birds. 'And now, / the candle blooms gorgeously away / from his hand— / and the light had made / blameless all over / the body of him.' The word <i>gorgeously</i> here points to the care with which each image is sought. Friends, lovers, and, by extension, readers are addressed with a parallel tenderness. Explicit sexual imagery is inserted so delicately that it's impossible to take offence. Written by a poet who also happens to be an African American, these are some of the most sensitive homoerotic poems to be found in contemporary literature. [<i>Cortege</i> is] recommended for all poetry collections."—<b><i>Library Journal</i></b><BR></div>