Robert Phillips is a prolific and engaged man of letters--a fiction writer, reviewer, critic, memorist, editor, anthologist, literary executor, and, most notably, a poet--whose writing has appeared in such prestigious journals as the Paris Review, Ontario Review, Hudson Review and the New Yorker. Despite the quantity and diversity of his work, however, and his legion of close friendships over the years with many of America's most prominent writers--among them Delmore Schwartz; James T. Farewell; Horace Gregory and his wife, poet Marya Zaturenska; Karl Shapiro; William Goyen; Elizabeth Spencer; and Joyce Carol Oates--Phillips has never received the level of the recognition he deserves. Part of the reason for this is because Phillips was slow to establish himself strongly in any single literary genre. His first two volumes of poetry published in the 1960s were not followed up with a more substantial book of poems for more than a decade...