At Literary Hub, I reviewed Rae Armantrout’s Go Figure, Daniel Borzutzky’s The Murmuring Grief of the Americas, Andrea Cohen’s The Sorrow Apartments, Jason Koo’s No Rest, Nam Le’s 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem, Carl Phillips’s Scattered Snows, to the North, and Danez Smith’s Blunt.
Here is my review of Phillips’s book:
Carl Phillips, Scattered Snows, to the North
In Carl Phillips’s ravishing new collection, the elegiacal vision, still haunted by an erotics of loss (“I’ve forgotten /entirely what it felt like to enter his body / or to be entered by his”), has become enraptured with belatedness, “those afternoons whose / diminished music we’ll soon enough / lie down in.” The lateness isn’t the sign of a life in its dotage but the work of an intelligence grinding through the repeated exigencies of its own conflagrations, “the mind done with signaling, letting its watch fires, one by one, / go out: the renegade glamour of late fall.”
The poetry here arrives at the other side of the fires, in sinuous complexes of metaphor that revive experiences through the glamour, renegade, melancholy, of their ruins. Phillips speaks gorgeously of how, with age, the “mind’s high watchtowers” still remain “under guard against siege by barbarians,” then switches the image to the “light reflected off / the blade of a knife” from a disembodied, gloved hand.
The glove, it becomes clear, enshrouds a master poet’s hand, and the knife edge harbors many entrancing reflections: how the brokenness of a lover’s face is like “a Paleolithic fragment of a reindeer antler decorated / with an image of a horse” or how the last portion of a life requires a wise, if elliptical serenity to avert the blinding glare of self-recognition: “I could see my face, / tilted there, like a solar eclipse viewed indirectly, which / is the proper way, in a basin of water.”
Detail from the cover of Scattered Snows, to the North. (Farrar Straus Giroux)