Review by Booklist Review
With 15 poetry collections, Phillips (Then the War and Selected Poems, 2007--2020, 2022) continues to deliver breathtakingly sensual poems that waver between cautious optimism and questions of self-deception, especially when confronting "the beautiful colors // of extinction." To see beauty in a world on fire, Phillips draws attention to small moments that encapsulate grand events, as when viewing an eclipse inside a basin of water and admiring the astral reflection's "competing / powers of revelation and distortion." Phillips' tonal fluctuations mimic seasonal changes, as if speaker and lyrics are inextricable from the forces of nature. In one poem, a gentle breeze moves drapes into dancing, the best way to "catch a wind god breathing." In another, the speaker praises "the renegade glamour of late fall, owlish, fox-ish" while pondering small ambiguities, like "how / brightness is and isn't a color exactly." Phillips crafts a hesitant syntax, defined by interjections, second guesses, and profound perplexity, as when the ruminating speaker of "Stop Shaking" posits the question, "What if memory's just the dead, flourishing differently / from how they flourished alive?" Beguiling and inviting, Phillips is unquestionably one of the greatest poets of his generation, a poet to be read and reread and reread yet again.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Phillips (Then the War) brings an increased awareness to endings in this elegant collection. "It's hard/ to believe in them,/ the beautiful colors/ of extinction," he writes in "Regime." Phillips has long been an exquisite navigator of the long sentence, and this capacity for meditation on the page is on full display, as is his flair for rendering thought through controlled syntax: "whereupon they began arguing, about language first,/ then about precision: resistance is only technically/ the same thing as hope." Dancing between beauty and catastrophe, he evokes desire and longing in the face of forces that threaten routine and survival: "Isn't every season,/ no matter what we call it, shadow season?" These poems strike poignant and enduring notes, suffused in "the split fruit of late fall," which "wears best when worn quietly." This is another poised addition to Phillips's dazzling body of work. (Aug.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Following the Pulitzer Prize-winning Then the War, Phillips continues his ever-persuasive study of the evolving self, revealing a tentative acceptance despite the underlying sense of melancholy. In the pointed title poem, reflecting on life's meaning(lessness), he wonders, "Does it matter that the Roman / Empire was still early in its slow / unwinding into never again?" Most of its citizens were "destined to be unremembered," but they "filled in their drawn lives / anyway"; work is still work and their tears are like ours. Throughout, Phillips reconciles himself to who he's become, acknowledging "a lack of warmth and compassion" on both sides as he sorts through friendships and how he pretends not to be fearful: "Some days, it works: I / almost believe myself." The settings here are often autumnal, the natural world framing a self-understanding in ways Phillips makes striking: "By then the point of the forest was the getting through it," he observes, and the wind bending young trees "makes me think of knowledge conquering / superstition,… / until the trees, like / fear, spring back." But as he accepts a hard world, he also accepts its grace: "I believe in gift as much, I think, as I believe / in mastery." VERDICT Another sterling work from the accomplished Phillips.
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