by Carl Phillips
Farrar, Straus & Giroux 2009
Reviewed by Jason Schneiderman

Melancholy, Baby

There is a change in Carl Phillips’s work that began in 2006’s Riding Westward and that continues in this year’s Speak Low.  The syntax is less pyrotechnic and disorienting.  There are fewer of those brilliant sentences that won’t reveal who or what was being discussed until they’ve already ended.  The bodies and the selves are more clearly defined.  In his first seven or so books of poems, there was a sense that every speaker, character, body, image could be as easily or as vicariously inhabited by Phillips as he was by the reader, and that there were no boundaries to anything.  But now there’s a sense of settling in, of stability.  In some ways, it’s more erotic now that bodies are more bounded, less likely to shift into each other—although with clearer boundaries, it’s precisely the limned border between them that he explores.  In the opening poem, “Speak Low,” Phillips begins by looking at how two things might touch:

The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly…
The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also.  The
water in that sense was the wind’s reflection.  

The water and the air are neither interchangeable nor permeable, and yet the sight of one is only allowed by the other.  The next poem begins with the speaker waking, “still on top of him,” and moves through a sequence of observations and questions about eroticism and affection—but the template is in place—the lover’s body is revealed against the lover—the boundaries that the pornographic imagination can never place on screen are evoked, the chest of the lover against the back. 

Phillips is a master at depicting a melancholic sex that never erases the desire that led to it—or rather, Phillips is a master of the melancholic moments after sex, without ever needing to reject sex itself for the sad commitments it can bring.  He never chooses between moralism and desire; the poem finally comes to a question about the relationship of the ocean to the sea, questioning the definitions, “I think the sea must be, / to the ocean, as disappointment is to sorrow…”.  At the conclusion of the poem, the boundaries are stretched, but intact:

When I woke, I was still on top of him—still inside him.
The sea isn’t far from us, it can’t be, I remember thinking:
through the dark, I could smell the sea.  It isn’t ocean, at all.

As it has been through much of Phillips’s work, erotic play in Speak Low is always in flux with intellectual examination—though in this volume, the bodies are more literal and physical.  In a meditation on drooping peonies, he writes

                                   …I even think they look, more
than a little bit, like rough sex once it’s gone where, of
course, it had to—do you know what I mean, his smell
on you after, like those parts of the gutted deer that
the men bring home with them, fresh from the hunt…

before contemplating Augustine’s ideas on passion, hunger and habit.  But Phillips is a consummate master of combining lyric leap with direct address.  He hooks the reader in at that “do you know what I mean” (and I’ve had more than one student who would respond, “I certainly do not!”) and implicates the reader in the desire and the image.  The poem concludes masterfully, urging the reader’s complicity:

           …Don’t go.  Let me show you what it looks like
when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.

Elsewhere, when Phillips speaks of “humiliation’s / not-so-strange allure,” it’s not an offhanded comment.  It’s well-reasoned ars poetica.
 

Phillips works frequently through short lyrics in this book.  “A Little Moonlight,” a sequence of three thirteen line sonnets, was one of my favorites.  In such small space, his vision is focused, even as the subject keeps turning away.  The second poem begins in the middle of a thought—

Suspecting, even then,
that the best way to avoid being
broken by flaw would be to shape my life
around it—

—and the final poem ends with a question about why sadness would come to one who wanted sadness: “Tell me why, when what I loved / from the start was how eventually each leaf must go.”  The smaller form increases some of the velocity of his shifts, and the poems pull into wonderfully tight conclusions.

Phillips is a master of what one might call the “concrete abstraction.”  Even as he works in the broad or general world of philosophical truth, the reader never loses sight of the bodies or objects in question.  Other attempts to name what it is that makes him so essentially appealing might include “melancholy logic” or “erotic reasoning.”  His carefully pitched poems keep turning the subjects in front of them, examining and re-examining, finding compelling conclusions or beautiful rules.  To enter a Phillips poem is to lose one’s bearing, to wait for the image to focus.  You trust that when the image becomes clear you’ll want to look.  But you also trust that you’ll want to look away.

*