Silverchest
Poems
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"After / the afterlife, there's an afterlife."
In Silverchest, his twelfth book, Carl Phillips considers how our fears and excesses, the damage we cause both to others and to ourselves, intentional and not, can lead not only to a kind of wisdom but also to renewal, maybe even joy, if we're willing to commit fully to a life in which "I love you / means what, exactly?" In poems shot through with his signature mix of eros, restless energy, and moral scrutiny, Phillips argues for the particular courage it takes to look at the self squarely—not with judgment but with understanding—and extend that self more honestly toward others. It's a risk, there's a lot to lose, but if it's true that "we'll drown anyway—why not / in color?"
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Phillips' 12th collection, as in previous collections, form pushes the writing's nimble logic, with ruminations on desire and risk deploying Phillips' trademark, kinesthetic syntax. But these poems reach an unprecedented vulnerability through conversations with the past "About nostalgia, I am/ still against it" as through a thematic effort to reveal the link between desire and power: "Nothing in this world/ like being held, he says, turning away, meaning// I should hold him I have been to Rome,/ I have known the body, I have watched it fall." Phillips interrogates causality and memory, exposing language as both an agent and a currency: " I love you means, what exactly?" and "Is it days, really, or only moments ago/ that I almost told you everything,/ before remembering what that leads/ or has led to?" These hesitations are not merely rhetorical gestures; rather, doubt proves the only path to reliably exhuming the former self: "Funny how/ sorrow more often arrives before honesty, than/ the other way round. To my left, a blackness// like the past, but without the past's precision." In these gorgeous, meticulously constructed lyric poems, nature and music motifs Phillips returns to often take on the role of correlatives, evoking the mind's own cadence, its certainty and thaw.
