Review by Booklist Review
In Phillips's tenth collection, linked poems with recurring images attend to the midpoint on the journey between opposites, as when one finds oneself in the shadow of and shadowed by both. As Phillips puts it in Continuous Until We Stop, But when I came to what I'd been told / was the zone of tragedy-transition-it was / not that. Escaping the shadow of one object means traveling deeper into the shadow of the other. Here, there is no bright light, no clear air. Phillips considers generic pairs-land and sea, day and night, light and darkness-and, in the better poems, strange bedfellows: Jesus and a man who wants to be flogged / while naked and on all fours. In the same poem, Phillips mentions the field they say divides prayer from absolute defeat. This title is typical: The Grass Not Being Flesh, Nor the Flesh Grass. Unrhymed, couched in a whisper, a few have 14 lines but do not qualify as sonnets. Not his best, this volume is for Phillips completists.--Autrey, Michael Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This 11th collection continues Phillips's assays into the connections between sex, attachment, and love, and the ways that, despite ecstatic moments, adult life means reconciling oneself to one's collective inadequacy. Phillips's peculiar fusion of classical figures, biblical imagery, and contemporary alienation is in full flower in poems like "Ransom," to startling effect: "come/ clean again, from a thicket all thorns.... And how the stars/ swelled the dark, guiding the man whose whip made the mules go faster, though they would have/ run, I think, even had there been no whip, being mules, and/ broken long ago, and with no more belief than disbelief in rescue." The poems repeatedly delve into intrarelationship incarnations of big moral quandaries. "Sacrifice Is a Different Animal Altogether" ends: "One of us is going to have to say it first"; in "Master and Slave," a partner offers a tender admonition: "If you can't love everything, he said/ Try to love what, in the end, will matter." But on the whole, the collection works, carefully and deliberately, to affirm the rhetorical question of "Sky Coming Forward": "What if, between this one and the one/ we hoped for, there's a third life, taking its own/ slow, dreamlike hold, even now-blooming, in spite of us." (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
"There's an art/ to everything. Even/ turning away. How/ eventually even hunger/ can become a space/ to live in." Phillips's latest volume (after 2009's Speak Low) examines the double shadows (the shadow under/behind the shadow) that existence casts on human lives. His poems seem to live inside these shadows, casting their own kinds of light through layers of darkness. His lyrical lines meander, sometimes for stanzas, and they aren't always clear or understandable until they've gone by. Yet the reader is left with silhouettes of images that disturb and startle, like the field that "divides prayer from/ absolute defeat," like "snow caught/ flying over open water from a fast-moving train," like the deadly but elegant hawk's flight. Motion and stillness, wickedness and joy, love and a way of loving, gratitude and regret: doubling haunts this volume. "What if, between this one and the one/ we hoped for, there is a third life, taking its own/ slow dreamlike hold, even now-blooming, in spite of us?" VERDICT Highly recommended for readers of contemporary poetry.-Karla Huston, Wisconsin Acad. of Science, Arts & Letters, Madison (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
