Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Starred review from December 16, 2019
The rich, ruminative 14th book from Phillips (Silverchest) begins midconversation: “—By fire, then, but within view of a rough sea?” it asks as though imagining how someone would like to die. It ends with an affirmation of spring in “Defiance”: “For by then all the lilies on the pond had opened.” These poems, which are filled with longing and a sense of the poet wrestling with himself, are made up of reflections that frequently run over 10 or so of Phillips’s signature long lines. He frequently alludes to water (the sea, a lake, waves, swimming) and juxtaposes memory and the body in resonant ways. His observations spring from probing mundane images (“say of the sea/ what you will, it’s the shore that endures the routine loss”) or by creating startling juxtapositions (“Like taking/ a horsewhip to a swarm of bees, that they might/ more easily disperse”). “My trade is mystery” he notes in “The Same in Sun as It Felt in Shadow”: “how/ all the more powerful parts to a life—as to art,/ as well, when it’s worth remembering—/ resist translation.” While Phillips is enigmatic in these poems, he is never coy, conjuring a rich intellectual and felt life on the page for the reader.

March 1, 2020
A prolific poet, Phillips (Wild Is the Wind, 2018) delivers one of his quietest collections yet. Here, his lyrics are filled with distance and ambiguity, and an enticing, beguiling imprecision that often leaves speakers stranded between decisions and action: Between trust and what trust equals, between that and everything / I say it does, why not do whatever? Underlying these airy, uncertain verses is a militant edge, as if spoken by a general of some ancient army tracking across a lost continent: Camouflage, / or foliage? Intention, / or just the way things are? Citing St. Augustine, Marcus Aurelius, and Homer, this scholar-soldier's voice struggles with a sense of purpose and of distinguishing meaning amid the fog of war: the difference between forgetting / to bring along artillery and showing up / on purpose to the war unarmed / is just that: a difference. Ultimately, these conflicted musings make moments of clarity blazingly bright: I'm the dropped sword in a glittering detachment / of raised ones. Another indispensable collection from one of America's finest poets.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)