... he has learned the difference, how
all the more powerful parts to a life — as to art,
as, when it’s worth remembering — resist
translation.
from “The Same in Sun as it Felt in Shadow”
I have been reading, admiring, and envying the poems of Carl Phillips for at least two decades. As a human being, I turn and return to them for consolation — about doubt, regret, desire, infidelity, fear, loneliness — not only to hear about said emotions, but to experience them in each poem’s unsettling, stirring raft of text: poems comprised of sentences so intricately paid out — in suspensions, eddies, asides, interruptions, questions, suddenly opened fields, and tidal pools of perception — that time disappears into mind, mind into body: dilating, delaying, contracting, and at last resolving into a nuanced frisson of ephemeral somatic clarity. Sentence into sentience.
As a writer, I often simply marvel at this verbal mastery/mystery. If there weren’t something always a little, or more than a little, beyond my grasping in the syntactic ambages of Phillips’s poems, I wouldn’t love them as I do. As Phillips writes in “The Same in Sun as it Felt in Shadow,” “My / trade is mystery, this song I also call mystery.” To overthink, to autopsy these poems in order to reveal their inner workings, strikes me, to paraphrase Dickinson, a bit like splitting open a songbird to find the music.
At other times, though, I can’t help but wonder: how does he do this? Surely it’s in part the way Phillips complicates the word-follows-word sequence of sentences, disrupting that forward flow with sleights of syntactical maneuvering, often beginning in medias res, for example, and then setting up some conditional or dialectic direction / ”if … then” or “if … when” argument that he then highjacks with a series of figurative “as if”s or “as when’s” that take the reader on seeming tangents that allow paradoxes to float over one another without the need for rational resolution. Another tactic is to interrupt a sentence with a metaphysical question, putting lots of time and space between a subject and its verb. Or Phillips may insert an appositive or a series of dependent clauses or a chiasmus-like pause in which the reader and the speaker in the poem, if they’ve lost track of one another, find themselves face-to-face in a feat of linguistic sorcery. And these sentences sometimes trellis over pages, stitched and unstitched with a full menu of period-delaying ellipses, semi-colons, dashes. With a simile or a repeated word or a conjunction, any Phillips poem can turn instantly from beauty to violence, disbelief to resolve, holding many competing feelings at once.
Here is “On Being Asked To Be More Specific When It Comes to Longing,” a poem comprised of one sentence:
When the forest ended, so did the starflowers and wild
ginger that for so long had kept us
company, the clearing opened before us, a vast
meadow of silverrod, each stem briefly an
angled argument against despair, then only weeds by
a better name again, as incidental as
the backdrop the ocean made just
beyond the meadow . . . Like taking
a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might
more easily disperse, we’d at last reached the point
in twilight where twilight seems most
a bowl designed to turn routinely but
as if by accident half roughly
over: bells somewhere, the kind
of bells that, before being housed finally
in their towers, used to
have to be baptized, each was given —
to swing by or fall hushed inside of,
accordingly — its own name; bells, and then —
from the smudged edge of all that
seemed to be left of what we’d called
belief, once, bodies not of hunting-birds, what we’d
thought at first, but human bodies in flight,
in flight and lit from within, as if
by ruin, or triumph, maybe, at having
made out of ruin a light, something
useful by which, having skimmed the water, to search
the meadow now, for ourselves inside it where, yes, though we
shook in our nakedness, we lay
naked as we’d been taught to do: when afraid,
what is faith, but to make a gift of yourself — give; and you shall receive.
In this long, breathless, and gorgeous sentence, rife with tension and beauty, Phillips answers the question given in the title of the poem by enacting the light and shadow of longing. The reader enters the poem in the midst of a walk that this pair has been taking for some time. Day is fraying, dusk is roughly descending. We’ve learned that the speaker feels that any argument against despair is really just a weed by a prettier name; this couple is at the “smudged edge of all that / seemed to be left of what we’d called // belief.” Via the interlude about bells, we feel a powerful sense of a sanctity prior to the perils of embodiment that surely parallels the circumstances of the lovers. The ending can only be understood as a moment of ecstasy, the lovers naked in the grass are outside of and hovering over themselves, “human bodies in flight, / in flight and lit from within as if / by ruin, or triumph, maybe, at having made out of ruin a light.” The poem evokes Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” but painted with Phillips’s inimitable palette of light and shadow. The lovers find themselves, as Phillips puts in “Instructions Prior,” however momentarily, in “the space between want and having.” Having skimmed the waters of the primordial origins of our flawed humanity, they are so transported that they must search the field to find themselves again.
In this new book, the reader will find many of the images and “familiars” that have haunted Phillips’ work over his long career — wind, clouds, fields, snow, bees, foxes, horses, bamboo, birds (hawks and other birds of prey as well as songbirds); likewise his flood subjects: apology, surrender, shame, vulnerability, faith, rescue, safety, rumor, betrayal, fear. Love. I also love tracking patterns of color in Phillips’s poems. He mentions the word often, but his is a closely keyed palette — light and dark (silver, pearl, shadow) move over and through the poems, with only glints of color (a red-winged blackbird, coral bells). Over time, I’ve come to associate blue in a Phillips poem with royalty, potency (“Then the dark — blue and damned, / erotic”) and red with stoicism, battle, blood (“The staghorn sumac’s splayed geometry”), both from poems in another book, Reconnaissance, in which there is a poem titled “The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World,” in which no colors are mentioned
In this most recent collection, perhaps because I am older than Phillips’s own “early part of the second half / of my statistical life” (“Barbarian”), I tuned in to the ways in which Phillips confronts how “the distance between longing / for the not-yet-experienced and for what’s already lost / keeps diminishing” (“Even if Sleep and Death are Brothers” He does so without sentimentality or nostalgia:
They say the difficulty with nothing-but-light,
as with utter darkness, is not so much that we cannot see,
but that we’re stripped of context: we’re as near
as far; all the waves stand frozen. I can’t stop thinking of the future
as the past, imitating a god.’’
from “Yet No Less Grateful”
As Phillips puts it in “On Mistaking the Sound of Spurs for Bells Approaching,” a poem in which he dismisses any tendency toward tropes of traditionally lyric or Romantic transcendence with typical wry wit: the desire to be free from loneliness is “a reasonable desire, I suppose, but / in the end a useless one, since actual loneliness isn’t / leavable: love distracts from loneliness, it doesn’t / crowd it from view.” He deepens this refusal of anthropomorphizing again and again throughout the book: trees, fields, animals, the sea, he says, do not feel for us. They are indifferent, as much as we might want to feel otherwise in order to assuage our guilt and responsibility or to ignore our own our mortal and moral agency.
And yet the speaker sings. And he writes in “As Easy to Cry as Not To”: “Call it loose notes on tragedy as, for once, the real thing / if you want to, but what is it, about spring?” He ends “So the Edge of the World” this way:
The wind was enough mostly—
not always. Not those nights when the wind
as if done at last with forever having
been a wind
became all song instead, a song
of abandonment, a wordless one, when you abandon a thing, best
if you can do so utterly, without words, yet
with an outward tenderness so believable, why else
does it hurt still, even now, the mere idea
of singing it?
I read each of Carl Phillips’s books for the deepest pleasures poetry can provide — intelligence, linguistic chops, mystery. I also read them as primers, field guides, breviaries: as translations of personhood, in all our flawed and searching complexity.
[Published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux on March 3, 2020, 80 pages, $23.00 hardcover]