Review: Carl Phillips's Latest

A few years ago, I wrote that Carl Phillips is the best writer of unrhymed tercets in the contemporary American poetry scene. I also said that wasn’t faint praise. I’ll stand by both of those assertions now, on the basis of “The River in Motion and Stillness,” in Phillips’s latest volume (FSG 2009). Also on display here is Phillips’s penchant for long sentences broken over lines and caesurae:

As if with the satisfaction of a near-impossible task
brought finally, and with no little struggling, to absolute
accomplishment, he lifts his ruined face up from beside

the other’s face, just as ruined, despite the sun being at that
angle that makes what ordinarily gets taken for flaw
very briefly what it also is: a loveliness, and something

strange, original . . .

The ellipses are in the poem, and, like the self-interrupting course of the sentence, they suggest the unending character of the experiences and perceptions Phillips recounts. Part of what makes Phillips so rewarding to read is precisely this tension between interruption and continuity, a tension held not only by the suspensions of sense over those syntactic and stanzaic breaks but also by the interplay of sounds. Listen to the simultaneous variety and insistence of “a” sounds in that sentence, the short “a” of “As,” “satisfaction,” “task,” “and,” “absolute,” continuing through the second stanza even as Phillips shifs to the long vowel of “face” (twice) and “taken,” “angle” and “strange.” There’s a similar alternation or interweaving of sibilants and fricatives, the hissing whisper of the lines providing a sinuous soundtrack over the modifying and qualifying phrases. The lines and their music perform what the poem’s title promises, motion and stillness.

Most of the poems in Speak Low are not in unrhymed tercets, but there are plenty of other elements that link the book to the poet’s previous nine (nine!) collections. Phillips was trained as a classicist, and this volume, like his other books, refers often to classical myths, histories, and texts (“Late Empire,” “The Plains of Troy,” “The Centaur,” “Fair Is Whatever the Gods Call Fair,” “Reciprocity”). These references suggest analogies between the violent emotions and actions of the old world and life and love today, but it’s hard to tell which is the tenor and which the vehicle, which of these we’re being led to understand in light of the other. “Happiness” meditates on the tears not of Achilles but of his horses at the death of Patroclus and imagines the beasts “hovering around their disbelief . . . as a bee will hover, // fooled at first, over freshly spilled semen,” the shift from past to present tense (and the context of the volume’s other poems on lovers and their discontents) locating the simile in today. The comparison’s ostensible aim is to illuminate those horses, but it’s contemporary weepers we really learn something about, just as in “Naming the Stars” Helen in the Iliad says something applicable not only (and not, for the poem’s purposes, chiefly) to the role of defilement in Homer’s world but also to the part it plays in ours.

Defilement; there’s another continuity with Phillips’s earlier work. This poet, more than any other living poet I can think of (and in company with such immortals as Catullus, Shakespeare, and Thom Gunn), forcibly holds our faces to the violence inherent in what we call (to make ourselves feel better? more human(e)?) love.
There is pain in these poems, there is torture, and these are inextricable from, are, maybe, constitutive of, desire. The speaker of “Now in Our Most Ordinary Voices” characterizes himself with references to sentences he’s “spouted” (“To know is to live flayed and Ambition / means turning the flesh repeatedly back – toward the whip”), as if to distance himself from these statements, but “Late Empire” and “Early Dreamer” and half a dozen other poems here seem still to proffer without apology similar sentiments.

So that it’s a relief, not because I doubt or disagree with Phillips’s intrication of love and torture (quite the contrary), and not because there is no pleasure in the pain he so tautly strings across the poems’ staves (there’s plenty of that), but because even after an enthralling storm, a compelling thriller, or a strenuously orgasmic bout of sexual combat the mind and heart and body seek rest and quiet, a return to equilibrium, to come to the book’s penultimate poem, “Husk,” which turns the volume down and reels the lines back in (“a wordlessness prevailing the way / a wind prevails”) and resigns itself, allowing us to resign ourselves in turn, with its concluding line: “So what, that we’re falling?” Falling, and fallenness too, have rarely fared as well as they do in Phillips’s classical handling, his careful hands.