Carl Phillips’ seventeenth book of poems presents lyrics of bitter introspection, but in a tenderer tone than usual, kinder to himself and others in meditative disappointments. These poems of late middle-age proceed through casual, yet laser-sharp, free-verse of longish lines, as if readers eavesdrop on interior thoughts. His subject here is failed relationships, reflected upon from the result of living alone. It’s not the delicious nostalgia of Cavafy, the Alexandrian Greek poet of a hundred years ago, thinking back on youth’s passions, reliving them in exquisite poetry. Rather with Phillips, it is a rueful look in the mirror to parse why things have happened just so. The answers are felt as well as stated, which involve differences, mismatch, indifference, and numbness. As a lyric poet of isolation, examining himself, Phillips also is a Horcean social poet thinking through the dance of relationships. While not witty, Phillips at times smiles to himself, and we readers might smile too. Unlike Horace, Phillips’ poetry is not one of moral edification, though his poetry offers introspective honesty, one of intricate precision and sober conclusion.
The tenderer empathy of Scattered Snows, to the North was inviting to me in what otherwise might be a frigid atmosphere. It suggests a shared humanity in not always being ‘our best selves’ or expecting such ideals. In “Fall Colors,” he meditates on having a persona, “an imitation of a self I want others to believe in,” and Phillips appears to be speaking of his own actual persona in his daily life. It’s one that, even among “real enough” friendships, has left them all with a “lack warmth and compassion.” His friends seemingly agree on this, implies the poem, a comradery of distancing. The poem is moving when, at the end, the poem’s speaker walks his dog. Via a looser grammar, Phillips on a ramble through a bramble seems to shed this persona, alone with his dog, more candid and less controlled. The persona has been defensive distancing. The dog truly is a ‘man’s best friend’ here. It is worth noting that Phillips is a master of intimate diction, one where his voice feels both elegant and without rehearsal. Of course, craft creates the casual.
Phillips’ signature style once again includes his education as a classicist, which gives his poetic introspections a shared anchor, especially to fans of ancient Greek and Roman lore. He makes it new, tied into his very specific life and kind of iconoclastic thinking about it. In this regard, I used to think of Phillips as a metaphysical poet. As with a figure by John Donne, Phillips takes an analogy and teases it out. For instance he does this with minotaur and centaur both. However, Phillips is a cerebral lyric poet. His voice is one of an overhead interior monologue, where these classical analogies add a broader resonance. Critic Walter Benjamin once criticized the metaphor in romantic poetry as misleading, because the comparison gets absorbed in a poem’s romantic flight. Here, Phillips’ cerebral lyricism keeps his analogies in compelling tension: history and personal, intertwined but not blended. The resonance is felt both ways.
The book’s title poem is a good example of Phillips’ signature approach. In “Scattered Snows, to the North,” Phillips mediates on how we live by imaging back to some anonymous Roman soldier on a border outpost, in an empire expanding and contracting, alone at the border of dangerous change. This analogy reveals Phillips’ mindset: The world, indeed, is dangerous. At the same time, the Roman soldier on a wall is no different than Phillips in his academic or poetic garret, or us, in ours. In this way, the poem spans history to land at our shared human condition. Let’s hope our outposts, hold, tonight. That’s the mood. So let’s read from it. After setting up the analogy, Phillip concludes:
Honestly, the Roman Empire,
despite my once having studied it,
barely makes any sense to me now,
past the back-and-forthing of
patrolled borders as the gauge
and proof of hunger’s addictive
and erosive powers. But there were
people, of course, too, most of them
destined to be unremembered,
who filled in their drawn lives
anyway—because what else
is there?—to where the edges
gave out. If it was night, they lit
fires, presumably. Tears
were tears.
The “back-and-forthing of / patrolled borders” at once points to the larger world in which individuals fill “in their drawn lives,” but also reminds a reader of the “back-and-forthing of / patrolled borders” of one’s own: how we make our way, how the world impacts us, the borders of our choices, even the “back-and-forthing” of free verse, and of course, our mental maps. I also like how the poem lands beyond “once having studied it” to a deep simplicity of “they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.”
Regular readers of Carl Phillips may find this collection to be a kinder one, in part because of its tender tone. I found the poems resonate with quiet precise emotion, which was an interesting contrast to the subject matter of distances within relationships. In “Somewhere It’s Still Summer,” Phillips does not write a pastoral poem, but wrestles with his own twin “lust and intellect,” which Phillips likens to a “centaur.” As an example of his loaded craft, the poem’s title implies a natural field and touches upon it, but the poem is about the ineffable interior of being. The poem may rely on summer as an analogy to ripe innocence, a romantic summer, or even the field in which desire plays or fights, like a centaur. Maybe it’s the ripeness of self-knowledge, the summer of maturing so to speak, exemplified by the poem’s self-reckoning. The poem deserves deeper treatment beyond the scope of this short review.
Phillips experiments with a handful of short-line poems, but his introspective explorations are more fulfilling through longer lines. The opening section of book has several poems on fleeting love affairs. A particular passion is forgiven, cherished even, though passes, in “Sunlight in Fog.” His isolation is described as “[m]y fortress has many windows,” in “Refrain.” In these poems, Phillips leaves his fortress, but returns again. He looks out, from late middle age, and takes stock, while walking onward.
G.H. Mosson is the author of three books and three chapbooks of poetry, including Singing the Forge (Wasteland Press 2025) and Family Snapshot as a Poem in Time (Finishing Line Press 2019). His poetry has appeared in The Tampa Review, The Evening Street Review, Smartish Pace, The Hollins Critic, and elsewhere. For more, seek www.ghmosson.com.