Philip White's poems have won a Pushcart Prize and have appeared in the New Republic, Slate, Hudson Review, Southern Review, New England Review, Antioch Review, and elsewhere. He teaches Shakespeare and early English literature at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky.

Other poems by Philip White in Verse Daily:
April 30, 2003:  "Threshold" "All morning the empty boats in the cove..."

Books by Philip White: The Clearing

Other poems on the web by Philip White:
"A Moment Ago"
"They Rise"
"Cricket"
"Vine"
Two poems
"Magnolia"

About The Clearing:

"Philip White's poems are possessed of a clarity and a control of feeling—they never edge on sentimentality—that manifest acquired wisdom and achieved skill. The Clearing is an unusually strong first book, no stranger to wit, but knowing of darkness and mindful of the need for projecting its own light."
—John Hollander

"How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain’s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don’t come back. After such knowledge, he then recognizes that ‘mind-changing sorrow dribbles away.’ His poems record irreplaceable loss, and they also represent one man’s resilience and his ability to feel and love again. The Clearing is a very promising debut."
—Willard Spiegelman

"Philip White’s remarkable sequence conveys with great force the emptying of self and world through the loss of a sustaining love, and the grim, gradual outliving of that state. Though anything but metronomic, his poems have a versatile formal strength, and can, for instance, make use at moments of the sonnet’s structure. Even when confronting a world void of meaning, White has an admirable descriptive power, and nothing could be more vivid than these graveside lines from ‘East Lawn’:

First the flowers were thrown,
then the earth. I remember the rich incremental
dark by shovelful smothering their flaming colors
like a cloudbank slowly blotting out stars.
—Richard Wilbur