Reconnaissance

August 1, 2015

"What if all we do is all we/ can do?" What if it's better to see "acceptance as the too-long-/ missing counterweight/ to the staggered weightlessness/ of sorrow, regret--the old/ angers, too?" In his follow-up to Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, Phillips keeps asking himself such questions, and he's at once acquiescent and combative, ready to settle down and acknowledge "what I've/ called the world continues/ to pass for one" yet disagreeing (if silently) "that maybe recklessness/ is overrated" and pleading "why can't innocence/ be instead a boat, slowing coming about?" Is Phillips's interlocutor here the reader or his beloved, whose hand he mistakes "in the night, last night, as mine"? Either way, it's remarkable how these poems, as always elegant, perfectly crafted, and deeply, meditatively interior, roil with doubt, resistance, and desire beneath the surface. That silvery surface shouldn't fool anyone; Phillip opens by "show[ing] the darker/ powers I've hardly shown/ anyone" as he gathers up hurts "just behind my heart, where they blacken/ and thrive" and ends with an open-ended challenge: "I disagree. Touch not the crown--Don't touch me--." VERDICT Phillips dwells insistently in his doubt, perhaps too insistently for some readers, but this collection is highly recommended for anyone ready to go the distance. [See Prepub Alert, 6/14/15.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015
In his recent book of essays, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination (2014), Phillips considers the intersections of art and autobiography, with special concern for the role of restlessness when it comes to morality, fidelity, and relationships. Themes of compromise and accountability also shape his thirteenth poetry collection. Throughout, Phillips illuminates a middle space between decision and consequence, like a dance partner midcollapse, suspended between release and impact. In The Greatest Colors for the Emptiest Parts of the World, the speaker reflects how easy it is to confuse estrangement with / what comes before that, what's really just another / form of being lost. These are poems of conflict and conviction that, occasionally, feel almost incriminating: You're the kind of betrayal, understand, I've been waiting for / all my life. With lyrics that are freighted with dark swarms of bees and droves of wild doves, Phillips also punctuates the verse with bright magnolias and emphatic conviction: I'll shout the starlings / loose from the pines again. A characteristically bold and beautiful collection from this brilliant lyricist.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)