One isn’t quite sure what engages
Phillips more, the real woods or the
idea of them. The question arises again
in “Musculature,” which begins with a
discussion of his dog and then digress-
es into a discussion of language and
mortality, the canine itself never quite
coming into focus.
That’s an abiding challenge with
Phillips’s poems, which can become so
immersed in intellectual disquisition
that they sound aridly abstract.
At his best, though, Phillips
has a keen eye for what’s tran-
sitory – for those things made all the
more beautiful because they can’t last.
In “Swimming,” he artfully compares
wind-swept trees to a kind of star that
a helmsman might steer by, then wist-
fully asks, “Do people, anymore, even
say helmsman?”
What results is a poignant moment- the poet using language to preserve
a memory, then wondering if language
itself, a cherished instrument for pass-
ing what’s precious from one age to
another, is also vulnerable to time.
It’s a problem perhaps only a poet
would be anguished by, though anoth-
er poem, “Brothers in Arms,” shows
Phillips coming to terms with the oc-
cupational hazards of his vocation:
“I’ve always thought gratitude’s the
one correct response to having been
made, however painfully, to see this life
more up close.” - Danny Heitmen
BOOKS FOR GLOBAL READERS
In “Coin of the Realm,” a collection of
critical essays that he published in 2004,
Carl Phillips outlined a literary sensibil-
ity that’s helpful to keep in mind while
reading his poems. “For me, to write is
a form of prayer, however secular the
subject of the writing at hand,” he told
readers. “Writing is as private as
prayer – it contains, as prayer
does, an implicit faith in there being
somewhere a listener and at the same
time a sober realization that prayer is
finally one-directional.”
That vision rests at the heart of Wild
Is the Wind, Phillips’s new collection of
poems. His verse often seems like an in-
terior monologue on which the reader is
casually eavesdropping.
The title “Wild Is the Wind” refers to
an old jazz standard, but it also neatly
chimes with Phillips’s interest in nature.
The double meaning of the title under-
scores his equal fascination with both
culture and the outdoors.
His poems casually quote Lucretius
or Marcus Aurelius while touching on
wind and water, woods and bonfires,
coyotes and storms. In the title poem,
Phillips recalls a time when he lived “at
the forest’s edge – metaphorically, so it
can sometimes seem now, though the for-
est was real, as my life beside it was....”
Poems that blend culture and nature
WHAT THE LOST ARE FOR
Here, before these shadows that,
in their disappearance, returning,
then falling as softly again
elsewhere, have sometimes
seemed the first and last lesson
left on the nature of power, though
they are not that, I bow my head,
I bend my knee. I hardly care,
I think, anymore, who goes there,
only let me pass – however
flawed – among them, my fears
not stripped from me, but kept
hidden as, more often than not,
just beneath stamina, somewhere
grace, too, lies hidden. Nobody
speaks to me as you do. Nowhere
water-lit do the leaves pale faster.
- From ‘Wild is the Wind,’ by Carl Phillips
GOLD LEAF
To lift, without ever asking what animal exactly it once belonged to,
the socketed helmet that what’s left of the skull equals
up to your face, to hold it there, mask-like, to look through it until
looking through means looking back, back through the skull,
into the self that is partly the animal you’ve always wanted to be,
that – depending – fear has prevented or rescued you from becoming,
to know utterly what you’ll never be, to understand in doing so
what you are, and say no to it, not to who you are, to say no to despair.
From ‘Wild Is the Wind,’ by Carl PhillipsPOETRYCARL PHILLIPS CAPTURES
THE SUBTLE JOYS OF BEAUTY
THAT CANNOT LAST.