Carl Phillips has published more than 10 volumes of poems to great critical praise, and Silverchest ranks among his most personal and poignant work. With striking metaphors from nature and its passing seasons, the sequence of poems probes the rise and inevitable fall of an erotic romance--tracking their speaker's infatuation, lust and love through summer's heat, November's falling leaves and winter's ponds, into spring thaw. As if simple adjectives are just not enough to describe such an emotional relationship, Phillips's poems liberally display his keen eye and ear for made-up, hyphenated ones.
In "Now Rough, Now Gentle," for example, we see early love as a "bowl of sliced-fresh-from-the-tree/ stolen pears"--sweet, but at risk to spoil quickly. While shuffling through fallen leaves in "My Meadow, My Twilight," the narrator says:
But to look up from the leaves, remember,
is a choice also…
...up to the wind-stripped branches shadow-
signing the ground before you... toward
belief--whatever, in the end, belief
is....
Phillips is never without seasoned perspective and an acceptance of love's travails. One of the best poems, "Interior: All the Leaves Shake Off Their Light," finds the lovers "too many fields away from/ where we'd meant to be," but it knowingly concludes:
Our ambitions were very high;
on occasion, we fell from them--swiftly, without surprise,
and very far. Never, though, would we have called that
failure, no--not then, and not now either. For here we are. --Bruce Jacobs, founding partner, Watermark Books & Cafe, Wichita, Kansas.