Spinach Days

Robert Phillips is the author of five previous books of poetry. He is poetry editor of the Texas Review and a councilor of the Texas Institute of Letters. He teaches at the University of Houston, where he was director of the Creative Writing Program and is now a John and Rebecca Moores Scholar.

The long title poem of Robert Phillips' sixth collection wryly evokes his days as a broke intern at an advertising agency in 1950's Manhattan... Phillips has a chatty, mellow voice that is appealingly textured... Throughout, Phillips's unaffected ease with formalism proves his greatest strength. A section of poems concerning love and sex possesses a gleeful streak of malice. He also works crisply in traditional forms ranging from villanelles to eclogues. -- Megan Harlan New York Times Book Review Spinach Days is poetry at its best-plain spoken and yet melodic, formal without reading like limericks, intelligent without being bombastic... It's the kind of book that makes the reader dog-ear the pages... Phillips is a poet of rare talent whose works will be read long after most of his contemporaries have faded away. -- Eric Miles Williamson Literal Latte These poems are a delight to read for their unpretentious craft and their flight from the orthodoxy of the obscure and the extreme. Phillips uses form with an ease that belies his artfulness and makes plain statements that belie the depth and complexity of the emotions he captures. Virginia Quarterly Review