Some poets seek topics never before explored. Others look around and see what seems constant, from antiquity to today: autumn and winter; aging and death; erotic desire, and our regret if it fades.
Carl Phillips belongs to that second group. He writes about those simplest, oldest things with a syntax so unpredictable, so elaborate, that they can seem almost new, even when — as in his new book, “Scattered Snows, to the North” — he writes as a man looking back over much of his life.
A poem called “Career” asks: “What if all the truth is/is an over-washed sweatshirt, sometimes on/purpose worn inside out?” In another poem, the word “joy” refers both to a transient emotion and to a horse the speaker keeps trying to ride:
Joy
if only flickeringly, each day
astounds me, the man I used to be
dismounts, relents for a bit,
before digging
his boots (streaked
with longing, my own
longing, what I can’t help) hard into
my sides again.
Such sentences make for a bumpy ride — that’s the point; love affairs make for bumpy rides too, and Phillips specializes in ways of recalling them, their tumults and their falls. “Sometimes,” he writes, “to remember a thing can hurt more than the thing itself/ever did.”
This 17th book of his poems — his first since winning a Pulitzer last year for his new-and-selected “Then the War” — does a lot of remembering, and even more self-questioning. Its attitudes range from the wistful and nearly Proustian to the bitter and nearly pedestrian, as if Phillips cannot quite bring himself to accept how much love he has lost, nor how many leaves have touched the ground.
Does loss, like the end of a sentence, like the end of a year, come inevitably to us all, as “early summer seems already to hold, inside it,/the split fruit of late fall”? Or could Phillips have acted otherwise, “negotiating this life/with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves/the handling of fires daily/daily handles a fire”? Again Phillips repeats a word either side of a line break; again he relies on syntax, on rococo word orders, switchbacks, oxbows and serial prepositions, rather than (for example) on assonance or unusual words or strange metaphors or rhyme.
Sentence shapes — as in, say, Henry James — can speak to the shape of a life: full of tangles and turns, hard to simplify and harder to figure out. Phillips might say to himself as a poet what he says to a man he no longer loves: “Even your mistakes were delicate.” Perhaps no poet has sought so hard and so long, in such a variety of grammatical forms, for ways to depict such familiar situations — a hookup, a breakup, a wish to turn back time: “I’ve never/stopped missing you, I used to/practice saying, for when I’d/need those lines, as I assumed/I would.”
And few poets in our time insist with such potentially self-undermining seriousness that their inner lives should matter, that their emotions deserve to be shared. An ex-lover, “his arms like blades,” like a killer, a reaper, “reappears/at the edge of that meadow inside me I’ve spent/most of my life trying to convince others isn’t made up/at all, but real.” Is that meadow real? Is erotic love real? Has the lover reaped, or harvested, Phillips’s life, or Phillips’s capacity to love? And is the meadow in question the same meadow that John Keats imagined in “To Autumn,” where the year and the day, the end of harvest and the end of a life, conclude in a harmonious swallows’ song?
Phillips (an emeritus professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis) has studied Greek and once taught high school Latin. Those ancient languages, with their elaborate grammars, surely inform his own. So do their tropes, in such poems as “Heroic Interval,” or “Gladiators,” whose starkness also invokes the late Louise Glück.
Readers familiar with Phillips might recognize, in “Scattered Snows, to the North,” his insistent seasonal focus, broken up by “men, riding horses,” cowboys and Western scenes, and by “the Roman Empire,” which (like a love affair) fell apart despite its “patrolled borders.” Those same readers might delight in the variety of line shapes: some lengthy and almost unwieldy, others curt and clipped, still others waterfalls down the page. Less enchanted readers might long for more euphonies, or more various symbols, or just find Phillips repetitive. But he ends up no more so than life, than snows that prefigure the end of an empire or leaves that change in the fall.
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