Now Speak!

Carl Phillips, Then the War
(Carcanet, 2022; pbk, £14.99)

First attempt at a review

At the time of writing, I have three essays about the work of American poet Carl Phillips sitting in various places, and at various points of completion around my desk. I was going to say that these essays were ‘in hand’, or ‘in train’—but ‘in hand’ and ‘in train’ would be to give a false impression of where I am at, here. For I am nowhere near getting down on the page some kind of adequate response to the poetry and prose of an artist with protean, mortal, omnivorous and hungry, and also priestly, ascetic capacities. Nowhere near… for ‘the wind is the wind’, he writes in ‘Entire Known World So Far’,

The map makes
the world seem like a human body
when it’s been stripped and you can finally
see it for the world it is: plunderable…

It’s as though Phillips has brought onto the page something that’s at once living and flagrant, and alive—the stag inexplicably there, on a raft/ at sea’—as well as wrecked and ‘plunderable’, and tender, as ‘suggest the hands that made the map’, and lost, and dying, for  ‘who wouldn’t want to lay waste to it’ is there in the last stanza too. Now, how am I to sum that up?

In a book review?

A report of sorts?

All I can think is can I remember feeling so much while reading a collection of poetry? After re—reading it? Can I remember being so… undone? For sure, it seems near impossible to get started on an overview, or go back and finish the essays that only go on and on as I keep discovering new ways in which Phillips’ work affects me, changes me, makes me think… About words and bodies and how they collide in language and in life. ‘But to have/ trained an animal to come just a bit/ closer’, he writes in ‘Night Comes and Passes Over Me’,  with its first line  

There’s a rumor of light that
any dark starts off as

as though the speaker is addressing at the point of arrival into the poem, and as we move through it what it is to find in the midst of our frail and wondrous and troubling lives, something Phillips calls, again and again, ‘meaning’ and ‘pattern’, and in other poems, ‘sturdiness.’ ‘In a Perfect World’,

Patterns like the one
where arrogance leads to shame

he gives us, and ‘just the usual  wrecked/ cathedral of the mind’ in ‘Everything All of It’. Yes, everything is there: the poem itself a means of settling, of taking stock and taking account while providing at the same time release from its attentions… relief and a way of going forward, going on. ‘I’ve always’, he ends one verse of that poem, opening up the next with  

loved how—unlike some trees…
Oak trees at a certain age begin
routinely losing, on purpose, some of
their branches…  

No wonder I can’t write about what I might try to know here but only what I feel! A poet in such full possession of classical metrics and tradition can’t help but carry me away to somewhere in which I hear only the pulse of the heart in the blood, the sensations in its beat of pleasure and desire and terror and pity. I don’t understand the method here—the use of specific syllabics and rhythms, certain forms—I need to learn it. But how I am carried. How I am indeed undone.

Second attempt

But this is a review and not an essay—so I’ll have to close down that big heart a bit. I’ll have to pull back my instincts, my desire to allow myself only to feel this work, not to feel I have to know it and show how I know. Because isn’t that what a book review is all about? A professionalised description of contents and effects, identifying themes, motives—and rendered in terms that are clear and precise, objective sounding. Yet, as Louise Glück writes, ‘Within the discipline of criticism, nothing is more difficult than praise. To speak of what you love—not admire, not know to be good, not feel briefly moved by or charmed by—to speak of such work is difficult because the natural correlatives of awe and reverence are not verbal.’ And how I do want to praise these poems; my imagination way too full up with my reactions to them to serve the strictures of a ‘review’. I’ll need some objective coolness, some distance. I am writing about the poet’s latest collection in a book review, so perhaps try starting with that. The first collection of Carl Phillips’ work to be published in the UK is called ‘Then the War.’ Would that do?

Third attempt

No. It’s dull and flat and nothing like the experience of reading this work. So I’ll start again here: From the moment we read the title of Carl Phillips’ new book—whether saying the words out loud or hearing them sound in the chamber of our minds—there’s a sense of being enclosed within this work. The three words come at the reader with full sonorous force—the two long beats of ‘Then’ and ‘War’ holding the short one between them to effect the drumbeat, the pace, of a funeral march, of a slow parade—we seem to be in their midst. The sound of an ending is here, a falling away into nothingness… and yet. Yet. Generated within the same title with its measures of death and dirge is a something else which is just beginning. For what has happened before that ‘Then’ (Before we started reading, perhaps? Or before the idea of narrative—Homeric—time? Or before some other historical event that has been fixed and is now done with?)  is also being given up to something that is going to happen next. All at once we are released into narrative time. The very possibility of it is encased in the connective. For where there’s a past, there’s a future too. And that ‘Then’ allows us to plunge right into the centre of all of it.  ‘Then the War’, indeed.  We’re in heavy mid flow here. We’re in medias res… and some. Be ready, says the title of this book. Something has happened. Something else is about to. Be careful. Pay attention. Look after yourself. For it may not be easy—there’s bruising and vulnerability and pain and risk—but there is also a luminous future, a world of feeling and beauty and love. ‘Light enters a cathedral the way persuasion fills a body’, Phillips writes in ‘And if I Fall’, and writes the same line again to finish the poem. A return, an underwriting so as to return. All is in flux and charged by the rich qualities of ever present time. Open up the book and come right in.

Fourth attempt

Such close reading doesn’t get me past the title though. I could spend forever writing these poems, line by line, what they do, why I love them. But as I say, that’s not a review. So try again with this instead by way of a beginning: ‘Then The War’, Carl Phillips’ collection of poems, actually comprises two books—the title volume and a ‘Selected Poems’ section spanning thirteen years of the poet’s published work, including one whole chapbook, ‘Star Map with Action Figures’, in its entirety. ‘I saw them as a separate project’, he writes in the  ‘Notes’. I could write another whole essay on this by the way: the notes indicating a creative practice of repetition and return that is deeply, deeply interesting in itself, suggesting a kind of philosophy, a labore est orare way of thinking, a satisfaction with knowing one’s own materials and keeping them close. That word I wrote earlier, ‘return’, features again here… Return. And so: This book, as I’ve written already (and wanting myself by now to repeat and circle again and again in the same way as though to relearn this work, as though I might understand why I feel so close to it—is part of what’s holding me up in my writing about it) is Phillips’ first UK publication, a moment of celebration for him as he made clear, quietly and modestly, at the Carcanet launch of his book last year. In America he comes garlanded with awards and honours, and is the author of 16 volumes of poetry as well as two essay collections, a Latin translation, and has editing projects and introductions that comprise his role as Professor of English at Washington University. Critics and reviewers talk of Phillips’ place in the culture—a gay man mixed race man taking on the rules only to ‘bend them’—but can his work be so easily summarised? These are not poems about one person’s life. These are poems about how it feels to be alive. Phillips’ verses and paragraphs are so…embodied, so made flesh in their subjects and motifs, and themes… so densely confected in their conveyance of experiences and sensations that they seem to be encouraging my not wanting to, in that way of a review, to be coolly cerebral and critical, and knowing of what’s going on… Only to be let inside them, let fully in…

Fifth attempt

OK. This is no kind of a review. I find myself unable to sit still and go though, point by point, the reasons for my love of a book of poems so vivid with the classical beats and rhythms of an ancient praxis that it muscles fully into the present tense. A book that I couldn’t put down —that I had to sit up through the night and read all the way through, the pages lit up by the poet’s attention—his  words ‘burnishing’ ‘burnished’ applying again and again. Here are forms and images that blaze with their own inevitability, as though a phrase such as

stutter—shifted across the walls the way,
in summer
the night moths used to, softly
sandbagging the river of dream against  dream’s
return…

was simply waiting to emerge, not crafted by a poet to appear as epiphany. See how Phillips’ focus upon ‘the rustling of the grass’ in ‘Glory On’, his gaze falling on a thing, makes it break into life through its depiction as sound and rhythm, showing ‘you belief as a thing that’s touchable’. These motifs and metaphors become as though three dimensional—‘constellate’, a ‘crown in hand, little flowers of gold’—through the way they are arranged on the page so that we seem to sense these poems, feel their shapes, more than read them…

Photograph by David Graham

There’s no time for everything I want to write about in this review that is not a review. That never was. The word limit has come and gone. Time’s up. Yet still I keep thinking of Michelangelo making his Moses through all this: the great lump of marble being chipped into, pared away and worked into as the sculptor seeks to release from it the form he senses within. ‘Now Speak!’ says the artist, upon completion, to the work he has made. So in these poems this is what the poet seems to do. The crafting, the shaping and task of bringing out and making clear, to show…That is all over. It’s invisible that work. It’ s finished with, it’s done. Now there’s only the poem to give voice. Listen! In ‘What I See Is The Light Falling All Around Us’,  

What’s the word
for the kind of loneliness that can feel like swimming
unassisted in a foreign language, for the very first time?

Do you know it? The word, the sound, of now and now and now?

Sixth attempt

And no more time now—only the doing of reading. The poems, ‘In a Perfect World’ , ‘Speak Low’ … ‘with their voices in a field unfolding’, with their ‘small wind’, with their ‘light on water.’ The poems, ’As the Rain Comes Down Harder’ and ‘Sing a Darkness’ and ‘In a Perfect World’… Read them aloud, hear how

Troy is burning. Let us
make of what’s left a sturdiness we can use to the end.

Seventh attempt 

There are nine sets of poems in this book but see if you can keep them separate in your mind. The book is whole. It is all of its composite parts. The book is like a body. It is alive.