Then the War

Starred review from November 15, 2021
Combining new and old poems from the last 13 years with sections of his lyric prose memoir, "Among the Trees," this selected offers admirers of Phillips's work a chance to revisit his masterful poems, and new readers an opportunity to see the evolution of a vital presence in American poetry. There is a deceptive looseness in Phillips's poems, which are conversational and intimate, heightening the poet's abiding concern with nuance. He begins "The Difficulty": "It's as if the difficulty were less about what happened—/ the truth presumably—than how little/ what happened resembles the story/ of what happened." Often, he lays two ideas side by side as a way of exploring how beings (fathers, lovers, dogs, to name a few) affect one another: "what isn't love—at all—/ can begin to feel like love" ("Of California"); "as if to be plundered meant at least not being alone" ("Among the Trees"). These lyrically rich, insightful poems are full of palpable aching—"like the rhyme between lost/ and most"—and a human urge to understand. This remarkable compendium is a testament to the spirit of Phillips's work.

December 1, 2021
With an entirely new collection of poetry from Phillips bundled together with a selection of his multifarious work from across his 30-year career, this is a master class in his deceptively gentle voice and striking depictions of raw humanity. Phillips combines breathtaking undercuts ("I deserve all I've ever built and fought for; we deserve our loneliness") with metaphors startling in their simplicity; of a lover, a speaker admits, "He'd become, by then, like the rhyme between lost // and most." Like desire lines, those paths tread by pedestrians who walk across the grass rather than plod along prescribed pavement, Phillips nearly always cuts straight to the heart. The book's older selections are pulled from seven books published since 2007. Whether it reflects the quiet militancy and enticing ambiguity of Pale Colors in a Tall Field (2020), the bold blossoms of magnolia and questions of causality in Reconnaissance (2015), or the breathy exhalations and erotic overtones of Silverchest (2013), every selection provides a portal to this accomplished author's work. An important milestone in the still flourishing career of a most brilliant poet.

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