Scattered Snows, To the North
Carl Phillips
(Carcanet, 2023); pbk, £11.99
Sometimes Kirsty Gunn and I trade interesting essays… almost mid-thought as if to probe some idea, to let a question hang in the air, to start a conversation. In this manner, I was introduced to Carl Phillips’s ‘Foliage’, first published in the Kenyon Review, and then included in his astonishing essay collection, an exploration of risk, openness and generative restlessness as conditions for art, The Art of Daring (Greywolf Press, 2014). From there I read Carcanet’s more recent publication of Phillips’ Then the War: And Selected Poems, a work that I am still composting… returning again and again with queries. Phillips’ work has only recently been widely available in the UK, so with my own questions still hanging in the air, I dared myself to read his newest title, Scattered Snows, to the North, shortlisted for the prestigious TS Eliot prize.
Phillips asks in ‘Foliage’, ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Art and Life: poetry as the transformation (not transcription) of experience in words. In reading Scattered Snows, to the North, I shall take my cue from Phillips’ essay. For these are thoughtful, expansive, if sometimes also frustrating to read, new poems made up of lengthy, sinewy sentences and syntax… all conveying a muscular intellect tethered to a body that loves, desires, and also decays. Tethered to—to use Yeats’ beautiful phrase—that ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’.
In ‘This is the light’, memory is the ‘deep light’ ‘unfiltered except’ by that first time even with ‘the latest stranger to have passed through by accident, if there’s such’. Yet there is a deliberate contrariness in that statement, for isn’t a palimpsestic overlaying of encounters and experiences a filtering of sorts? Assertions are threaded through with phrases caught between em-dashes (channelling Emily Dickenson perhaps), or hesitated over in their ‘as if’s, or sometimes seemingly retracted after the fact of, trailing off into ellipses; moods are expanded in images seemingly unrelated except in paratactic associations.
Long complex sentences, marked by qualifiers (‘if there’s such a thing’; ‘but’; ‘is and isn’t… exactly’), interrupted by em-dashes, raggedy spaces and enjambment make for slow reading. Frequent commas further disrupt our conventional sense of prosodic phrasing—remember that suggestive comma of the collection’s title that prevents us from rushing to the end of the phrase? Those striking commas throughout his poetry also pause the eye-line, though there is some difference between seeing the poem on the page, and hearing Phillips’ online reading of them.
Phillips’ images expand outwards, complicating, rather than subordinating what came before. Thus starting with light of the title, expanding to take in the ‘deep light’ of the inaugural line of ‘This is the light’, and then moving outwards to include the strange sounds of ‘night-dark’, before making the transition to the passerby stranger, and reflecting on actions and encounters as metaphor, reading poetry is less linear and more like ripples outwards that carry their own motion. The retrospection (‘old enough’), signalled in the poem by coming to terms with the putting out of fires, the ‘renegade glamour of late fall’ (American term has rich symbolic associations not present in the word Autumn) propels itself towards nocturnal animals similes (‘owlish’, ‘fox-ish’):
… Now you live here, where it’s likeliest you’ll die, too,
you’re finally old enough, not just to say, but—without
sorrow or fear, most of the time—to understand the truth of it,
the mind done with signaling, letting its watch fires, one by one,
go out: the renegade glamour of late fall, owlish, fox-ish, how
brightness is and isn’t a colour exactly…
From there, we encounter trees bearing pink-white fruit that serve ‘like a vow against’ winter’. Yet the bright fruit is but a simile, a fig-leaf ‘cover’ for the tree’s ‘nakedness’, and is later thought to resemble ‘shrunken heads of goblins in miniature’. Such a stitching together of distinct images, worked up almost as richly textured connotative word and visual puns, with all those the qualifiers and interruptions, make for an unsettling reading experience. Reading as wrestling. Much like slow reading, a muscular attentiveness is needed to catch the nuances of Phillips’ associative transitions. Yet then all at once, the poem ends with the clarity of coupling, the man ‘unbuckling’ (literally and metaphorically) results in a day ‘as close to perfect as perfect as perfect get here.’
There might well be a touch of Wallace Stevens in the poet’s grappling with the ideas… albeit never abstractedly but always reeled back to the body, ‘caught by that sensual music’ (but am I over-channelling of Yeats here? Even when they are so different, themes in this collection recall Yeats’ poems of old age). In ‘Somewhere it’s still summer’, the ‘moral valence’, the question of risk and danger in life and in art is pondered through the act of sex between men, ‘surprised, disturbed, bewitched,/ or merely entertained’, riding bareback, knowing precisely what it
feels like, to be a centaur—
the horse’s body, the man’s
steep chest, all hybridity
and power, two powers
especially, lust and intellect [.]
The poem ends with ‘Absolutely nothing mythological/about them.’ The physicality of love between men may be outwith my own experience, but the tenderness or hostility or struggles such coupling engenders isn’t. ‘Artillery’ collides ideas and experiences (loneliness, tenderness, conflict both as dialogue and argument) with images (lawns, flock of wild turkeys) to end with the lines,
Why not call it love –
each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him
closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.
A body penetrating another body, a mind wrestling with another, words bleeding between and betwixt.
Elsewhere, there are poems on and of water, and ebbing and flowing are also built into the structure of the collection. Similar ideas, images, phrases and themes ebb and flow, to and fro-ing between poems; poems that bear sectional titles are not contained within the sections which bear their names. Doubling back also occurs when the speaker addresses himself in poems as an older self speaking to his younger one, for example, in ‘Fist and Palm’. The overall effect, I think, is to make Scattered Snows, to the North seem much like the intimacy of conversation with self that we, as readers, are also allowed to engage in.
‘Foliage’, of course, reminds us that creative tension is the stuff of art: ‘Release, restraint. Lengthy, complex sentences; short and simple ones.’ And so it is with this collection. Set alongside complex poems with long sinewy lines are crystalline declarative gems. ‘Regime’ unfolds in tight tercets, reminding us that mortality, love and beauty are inextricably linked as a planetary condition for all things alive. Here the love-making segues into the memory of the sound of rain, wind through the river birch trees (all by way of negative comparisons), to arrive at the astonishing punch of the final sentence:
It's hard
to believe in them,
the beautiful colors
of extinction; but
these are the colors.
In ‘Before all of this’, early summer holds
inside it,
the split fruit of late fall, those afternoons whose
diminished music we’ll soon enough
lie down in—
and the loose, languid music of the poem’s long musing ends with the seeming finality of the poem’s short, taut declarative lines, given their own airy line spacings,
The air stirs like history
Like the future
Like history
… except, of course, that there is no punctuation to end stop that line.
Scattered Snows, to the North is a bold and complex collection, and Phillips risks much both in its soul-baring intimacy and vulnerability, at once personal… yet also moving much beyond the simple confessional. Impersonal passion, the words of self (those telling phrases are Denise Riley’s). Poetry here becomes a temporal puzzling, a thinking out, letting ‘a sentence find its own wilderness’. Readers will also need to grapple with poetry at the level of the sentence, but what is life if not to move us out of our easeful and cosy comfort zones? ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Indeed. This is an important book, and there is much to learn, to attend to, to linger over, and to take pleasure from these ‘songs… built from things too difficult to speak of’. So risk it—accept that challenge.
