A Poet Who Considers Timeless Topics, and Finds Ways to Make Them New

SCATTERED SNOWS, TO THE NORTH , by Carl Phillips Some poets seek topics never before explored. Others look around and see what seems constant, from antiquity to today: autumn and winter; aging and death; erotic desire, and our regret if it fades. Carl Phillips belongs to that second group. He writes about those simplest, oldest things with a syntax so unpredictable, so elaborate, that they can seem almost new, even when — as in his new book, “Scattered Snows, to the North” — he writes as a man looking back over much of his life. A poem called “Career” asks: “What if all the truth is/is an over-washed sweatshirt, sometimes on/purpose worn inside out?” In another poem, the word “joy” refers both to a transient emotion and to a horse the speaker keeps trying to ride: Joy if only flickeringly, each day astounds me, the man I used to be dismounts, relents for a bit, before digging his boots (streaked with longing, my own longing, what I can’t help) hard into my sides again. Such sentences make for a bumpy ride — that’s the point; love affairs make for bumpy rides too, and Phillips specializes in ways of recalling them, their tumults and their falls. “Sometimes,” he writes, “to remember a thing can hurt more than the thing itself/ever did.” This 17th book of his poems — his first since winning a Pulitzer last year for his new-and-selected “Then the War” — does a lot of remembering, and even more self-questioning. Its attitudes range from the wistful and nearly Proustian to the bitter and nearly pedestrian, as if Phillips cannot quite bring himself to accept how much love he has lost, nor how many leaves have touched the ground. Does loss, like the end of a sentence, like the end of a year, come inevitably to us all, as “early summer seems already to hold, inside it,/the split fruit of late fall”? Or could Phillips have acted otherwise, “negotiating this life/with all the seeming casualness with which a man whose business involves/the handling of fires daily/daily handles a fire”? […]

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