a gift to be held close to the chest, stubborn horse
meanwhile beating wild beneath it, stubborn heart,
a dark, where was a brightness, a bright where dark.

The poems may be sparse, yes—they are rarely over a page long and most often flex the lean muscle of a short line—but they contain a certain linguistic wit reminiscent, perhaps, of Williams. Here are streaming sentences full of clauses that build and build, juxtaposed against verb-less fragments landed between two full stops. Like this, the poems themselves are like double shadows, pliable things wrought from the masterful artist, a man many consider to be the reckoning force in contemporary American poetry. This accolade seems apt when reading lines like these, from “After the Thunder, Before the Rain,” where Phillips attempts to define the slippery ground between guilt and humility—

Not at all like the mind
circling, ring upon ring—I can’t, I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t
have, I’ll never again—no end, no apparent ending.

Praise for this linguistic prowess become wit is not to say these poems are without weight. Quite the opposite. During a time when much of American poetry is criticized for being poetry lite, Phillips can move us in a single poem from complete joy to utter heartbreak. Such as here, in the ending to “Glory On”—

Whose business
but mine is it if now, when I grieve, I grieve
this way: crown in hand, little flowers of gold?

Double Shadow may be a slim volume—just over forty pages of poems—but the poems themselves hold a mystical, chiseled weight, one that can only come from a major poet like Carl Phillips, whose last book is Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems 1986-2006, the culmination of nine previous collections. Additionally, he has a critically acclaimed prose collection, Coin of the Realm: Essays on the Life and Art of Poetry, and a celebrated translation of Sophocles’ Philocetes. Phillips is currently a professor of poetry and African American studies in a top English program, Washington University in St. Louis, and the series judge for the Yale Younger Poets Prize, a post he assumed following Louise Glück’s tenure there. In short: if one hasn’t been reading Phillips for the last decade, it is high time to start. Double Shadow seems to find the poet at mid-breath, or in a time of transition where the voice may be in flux from previous work; but the watchful eye, and the careful hand that crafts these verses, is still ever-present.

The voice of Double Shadow sometimes reads (appropriately, and timely) disillusioned, but never at the cost of reaching outward in longing, like in “Night”—

The restless choir
that any human life can be, sometimes, casts forth
all over again its double shadow: now risk, and now
faintheartedness—we’re not what
either of us expected,
are we?—each one a form of disembodiment,
without the other.

And isn’t this some great Truth we can trust in? That like the broken line, or the fragmented sentence, we are disembodied without each other? Carl Phillips is nothing if not exactingly alert to the truths of our age and our bodies, of our faults and our redemptions, and of that—Art—which propels us forward.

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…to slip naked into the slough
with the wiry boy who peeled each apricot—
as if slightly uncertain how to partake of it—

and savored: dribbling it down his damp chest,
between his long clammy legs, and moistening
his whole delinquent body with pleasant juices.

Indeed, it’s been a long spell for each of us (and our tribe, and our nation, and our…). Yes, this is just what we need—a beautiful adonis in the orchard, naked and engulfing a sweet, juicy apricot. Or at the very least, Powell is taking us there through his own watchful eye, a masterful lens by which he forges, always, poems unparalleled in their meeting of play, and its cousin pure joy, and the high art of exacting poetic craft. I can’t think of a poet that does it better than Powell. Nor do I want to.

Who else can sustain a stanza with an image, deceitful in its simplicity, such as this—

The river rocks globular and slick,
the catfish with its wet dark skin,
and the afternoon’s durable glassy eyes.

As a boy from the Ozark Mountains, place with endless rivers and caves, place chockfull of deceptively simple pleasures, I can tell you Powell is spot-on in the scene he bestows here. I’ve been the boy in this orchard by the water, and in turn, I’ve been the boy watching him, longing for him. But I’ve never been able to paint the picture like Powell does.

Like so many of the verses in Useless Landscape, this poem partakes in giving superlatively versed wisdom (it isn’t alternatively titled A Guide For Boys without just reason). The inviting wisdom, which here is somehow both witty and quiet, bubbles gracefully to the surface: “I do not mind you closing your own eyes, reclining. / Summoning the image of a lover put away. / Because virtue is hardly what either of us saved // from our separate, desperate beginnings.”

I first heard this poem in October, when Powell read in Pittsburgh. When Useless Landscape came out on Valentine’s Day, I read it again and again, longing first for the boy in the orchard, then for the pure pleasure of reading such a superlative poem. I’m still reading it. And again. If there’s a poem that can save us, one that can take us from season to each new season with hope, it’s certainly Powell’s “Reaching Around For You,” which finally promises that “stonefruit from a tin is almost as good as fresh, / when the spiteful frost arrives.”

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What first strikes me about “Cockroach” is what amazes me about every Mann poem: that sense of control. Each line contains no superfluous word; each image is succinct and necessary. Each line break—yes, line break!—holds a weight full of both emotion and precise decision; these breaths simultaneously stop time and move it forward. In this way, Mann is a poet’s poet.

But what really strikes me about this poem is how it brings that level of craft into a marriage bed with popular culture. The movement between the second and third stanzas is exemplary:

I played
with my Anne Sexton
action figures; I played adolescence.
Nothing came between me

and my Calvins, not really

How richly layered with emotion that is! First, we’re laughing with the idea of an Anne Sexton action figure. Then we’re shot to heavy introspection by the thought of “playing” adolescence, where we dwell for just an instant before smiling again because indeed, nothing comes between us and our Calvins. Other poets all- too-often lose the emotional complexity poetry is capable of when addressing the popular. Mann, however, serves as our fully-capable captain as we sail through the here and now, through Walgreens and the gated community, through Mr. Roboto and the adult video store, through the very waters that make up our cultural identity.

“Cockroach” joins a rich lineage of poems that use pesky creatures—such as Lowell’s skunk—so beautifully as literal figure and effective trope. The cockroach in Mann’s poem briefly laments “you may not remember me,” but when I see those little black legs scurry across the floor, it is guaranteed: I will remember, and gladly.

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