Silver

December 18, 2023
Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips (Living Weapon) offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is “a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges”; “part physics, part faith, part void”; “the breath your breath takes before you breathe”; “séance and silence and science.” Poems in blank verse deliver metaphysical considerations as Phillips asks, “What forms/ First: a thing or its form? The I or me?/ The maker or the thinker?” and responds, “But now when I think of that lost thought,/ Somehow found here in the sudden and faint/ Power of sacred songs, perplexity/ Sidles in with the setting sun again.” Wordsworth’s autobiographical work explicitly inspires the volume’s long, final poem, “Child of Nature,” while in diction and sensibility, Wallace Stevens is another prominent genius loci, as the speaker roams “the shore and chatoyance of the sea stones,” or distinguishes between “the torque/ Of the bay and not the bay itself.” Elsewhere are moments of delicate, singsong probing: “Hadn’t it all/ Been something else/ Before? Something// Else somewhere/ Else to someone/ Else before?” and self-mythologizing verses: “Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:/ The ground, then heaven, then the weapon.” Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering.

February 15, 2024
Phillips' latest poetry collection begins and ends with poems titled ""The First and Final Poem Is the Sun." The first iteration declares the book's theme: "Which means that poetry is a ritual that the sun organizes / and arranges." Phillips guides each poem in this slender volume through various metered forms. The musicality shines more than some of the mythological references. The long ode, "La Pluga," expresses the adoration of a famous footballer in action: "When does a habit become fact? When the ball / Arrives to you. You swing your left foot / Waist-high to meet it." A eulogy and memorial of a mother who dies of COVID-19 are found in two poems, "Prelude" and "Postlude." Phillips intersperses elements of his life throughout, subtly using the word "silver" to dazzling effect, as in ""En el tiempo indeciso: "" ""And the vanishing of tomorrow's plane // As it describes the future in its fade: / The plane silver, its vapor trail silver, // Silver filling the spaces where they've been."" A collection to ponder in wonder.

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June 1, 2024

Phillips (Living Weapon) opens his latest collection with this deep, wondrous thought: "not the meaning but the meaningfulness of this mystery we / call life." Yet, intriguingly, his search for meaningfulness is delivered not as philosophical reflection but as lusciously written, even near-mythological musing: "Blue Papa of the cosmic canticles / That the moistened plums sing to throbbing stars, / Stay awhile.... The larks / Are still asleep inside your old guitars." Moving gracefully from soccer celebrity to visions of Barcelona and Key West to his grandmother's affectingly portrayed death, that search spotlights less formula or prescription than a sense of things: as autumn approaches, "one final / Song of summer / ...that feeling that comes and goes, what is it?" Song is indeed crucial to the poet's understanding of our richly lived mystery, from "The Triumph of Song" to poetry as "a song of force," but it's not as simple as humming a merry tune: "It was the right power / For the wrong fool. / It was the wrong hour // But the right tool" says the poet at one point, and elsewhere: "There was no preparing for it, an ear / Either knew it or not, nothing easy." VERDICT From fox to car to misty morning, silver glints throughout this polished collection, woven in like meaningfulness in life. A strong entry, appealing for most readers.

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