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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If I were to assert that the lyric tendency in poetry runs in an inverse relationship to narrative, where narrative consists of a story with a character in a place, The Rumpus’s server would, I’m sure, be overwhelmed with all three readers of this review arguing that The Rumpus’s reviewer is way off. If there’s a speaker, dude, there’s always a story. They would have a good point. Nevertheless, I’m going to go ahead and say that, on the lyric-narrative spectrum, Carl Phillips’s new book Double Shadow is maximum lyric, minimum narrative. Whereas a story is specific and located, Phillips’s poems, though they use specific images, live mainly in the abstract. They deal in the Big Ideas of being, love, and the suffering that is inevitable in existence. I was going to say “the suffering that is inevitable for all those who consciously exist”—all human beings in other words (although, as a high school teacher, I can think of human beings apparently existing without any sort of consciousness at all)—but then I remember that, in Double Shadow, suffering puts its hypothermic hand on the backs of all living creatures. In that sense, it might help to think of it as a spiritual book, a lyric struggle of an individual in the face of mortal suffering.

Phillips deals powerfully with other big ideas here, too. Some of what this book is about, besides suffering, includes fear; the relationship between love and sex; the relationship between love and power, and sex and power; violence of living creatures upon each other and themselves (probably the most striking image of the book comes in a poem called “Fascination,” where “. . . the trapped fox has stopped / mutilating its own body to at last get free. Has stopped trying. / Consigns the rust-colored full length of itself to the frosted ground.”); spiritual forgiveness; romantic forgiveness; rage; regret; anger; and what consolation either beauty or pleasure can offer. The more I think about it, the more I see the book as a meditation on how hard love can be, and in that sense, too, it fits squarely in the lyric tradition.

A representative poem might be “Master and Slave,” where the poet finds a moment of peace in his lover’s momentary calm and tenderness, presumably after making love. Here’s the poem, in full:

For the longest time, he said nothing. I looked
through the glass at what he was looking at: brindled
dog shaking the rain free of herself in a field of flowers,
making the colors stir where, before, there’d been
a stillness like what precedes a dangerous undertow or
a choice that, for better—and worse—will change a life
forever.
              If you can’t love everything, he said
Try to love what, in the end, will matter. Not the dog,
doomed to fail, but the rain itself; the rain, getting
shaken … There are days when, almost, I think I know
what he meant by that. I can understand—I can at least
believe I do—his face, his mouth, that last time: for once,
unferocious; done with raging at his own regretlessness and confusion.

In this poem, we can see Phillips’s awareness of fleeting beauty (the dog, the glitter of raindrops around her, the flowers) and its complicated connection to emotion as in, here, threat. The lover offers a piece of wisdom that fits with the poet’s own attempts at wisdom throughout the book: You know what’s living will die. Love what you know will last—no, love the fleeting image, the pleasure it gives you. As elsewhere, Phillips is full of doubt and self-correction. Take the opening of “Clear, Cloudless”:

Tonight—in the foundering night, at least,
of imagination, where what I don’t in fact
believe anymore, all the same, is true—

When despair seems ready to overtake a poem, or a moment, it veers toward something redeeming, which turns out to be based on nothing, but then, maybe, not nothing. In “Master, Slave,” too, Phillips lets himself go with his belief, bolstered by its existence now in a poem, that he understands his lover’s briefly unferocious face. That moment of understanding is brief, but it’s the best we can expect as mortal, imperfect, fearful lovers.

Phillips’s constant doubt is emphasized in his tortuous, slightly tortured syntax. The syntax is also highly formal, with phrases like “even had there been” (4), “I wear on my head a crown / of feathers” (20), “clutching tightly to his chest” (24). Diction this heightened tends to feel put on rather than straightforward and honest, and it made me distrust the speaker at first. Eventually, though, I started to think of it as a way to resist the entropy of suffering that the book is trying to understand. I realized the almost stilted register was the speaker’s ritual for holding himself up from the blood and shit a person has to deal with every day, being alive.

The end of the book offers a redemption. It’s a relief and release as the poet lets go, relinquishing control as he’s wanted to from the beginning. To what he releases himself is unclear, or, rather, undiscovered: “As a horse in harness to what, inevitably, must break it.” In being broken, the horse is tamed, no longer panicked and fighting, no longer wild-eyed and free, and no longer fearful. This release, a sexual release as well as the release of death, is also a letting-go into the control of a power much greater than the individual. That is Phillips’s desire in this book, and the struggle is to what he should release himself—the beauty of the image? The lover? Poetic form? God, in one sense or another? The closing lines show Phillips’s formal power as they find a kind of freedom in both image and syntax: “No torch; no lantern—and yet no hiddenness, now. No hiding. / Leaves flew through where the wind sent them flying.”

Double Shadow is, as its title suggests, dark. Even harrowing. It is an über-lyric struggle to understand the interdependence of desire and pain. For better and worse, it is very much about the self, very much “traditional” lyric. It’s not the kind of book this reviewer is drawn to—it’s too grandiose, too self-serious and worried—but because the thinking in it is clearly so hard-won, and many of the lines are beautiful, I trust the insight and am impressed by the spirit that lives and creates within the struggle.

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When writing about sex, Carl Phillips has few living peers. And because he’s so good at it, he is never constricted by the subject. He recognizes that, overtly or covertly, it is always with us, and he is exquisitely expert at describing sexual longing, and the moments when sex, the act itself, or suggestions of it, heighten ordinary scenes. He’s off to an acutely layered start in the title poem of Speak Low, his tenth collection:

The wind stirred—the water beneath it stirred accordingly…
The wind’s pattern was its own, and the water’s also. The
water in that sense was the wind’s reflection. The wind was,
to the water, what the water was to the light that fell there,
or appeared to fall, spilling as if the light were a liquid, or as
if the light and the water it spilled across
                                                      were now the same.

This is sensually encompassing, natural and refined, with partner beneath the wind stirring, the words “spilling” and “spilled” almost Biblical in tone, the merging appropriately qualified, to recognize that for all one would hope of true union in the sex act, that ached-for sameness is more often than not elusive even as it is acknowledged. The second and third stanzas are equally satisfying because they, like their companion lines, can be read as a straightforward description of an appealing sight in constant motion— wind, water light. Nothing here alludes to flora or fauna because Phillips understands when to meet completion on its imagined, but no less living terms .

He is less subtle, but just as satisfying in “Southern Cross,” the next poem, which begins :

When I woke, I was still on top of him. Darkness, to
darkness. The taking of leave again until leave-taking
becomes, itself, souvenir, the only one I keep—that’s
worth keeping. See how it begins to look like courtesy,
in the right light,

                              with a little distance?

Its easy to understand why his poems are so affecting, but that makes them no less elegant, profound and aurally rich, with line breaks giving ear, eye and heart just the right amount of space to absorb his unflinching, methodically felt examinations which would seem pompous if they were less gentle, or if he did not acknowledge with such care the other actor in this naked, quiet moment.

Phillips engages in classics in ways that animate and enhance his efforts, but he is much less constricted by the so-called norms of earlier societies. The last lines in “In a Perfect World” illustrate this point:

the not-so-clear-anymore perimeter of Who says so?
A single mother-of-pearl stud catching parts of the light—
for now, holding them. Troy is burning. Let us
make of what’s left a sturdiness we can use to the end.

“Happiness,” which speaks of the tears of Achilles, and contains other ancient allusions, is as fine as all the poems with historical content in this consistent, tenderly muscular volume. It takes long-lived attentiveness, and a disciplined engagement with the material of talent, to get away with comparing rough sex to peonies without sounding insipid—those heavy-scented blossoms, so soft to the touch, so heavy-hanging when past their prime. In “Distortion,” Phillips does it, just right :

Having opened to their fullest, they opened further—
Now the peonies, near to breaking, splay groundward,
some even touch the ground, and though I do understand,
yes, that they’re the not-so-lovely-after-all example
of how excess, even in the smallest forms, seems to have
its cost, I think it anyway.

                                        I even think they look, more
than a little bit, like rough sex once its gone where, of
course it had to—do you know what I mean, his smell
on you after, like those parts of the gutted deer that
the men bring home with them, fresh from the hunt,
as if you were like that now, the parts, not the smell, I
mean as if you were all his, all you’d ever wanted to be,
and how you almost believe that?
                                        Do you see that, too?

The insistence of “Do you see that, too?” is another example of passion’s compulsion, and the piece continues, until, reading with the breath of the poet or as close to that as every syllable, every comma can possibly enable, there is more, final, irresistible insistence in “Don’t go. Let me show you what it looks like/when surrender, and an instinct not to, run side by side.”

This leaves me panting, and wanting to sing in wide voice, grateful for the opportunity to encounter a mature voice that is always restless: “I should perhaps, regret more. But it’s grown / so late : see how dark, outside?” Outside what? Is a reasonable question given that comma, but the question needs no answer other than the expanding rumination in part two : “Suspecting, even then,/ that the best way to avoid being broken by flaw would be to shape my life around it—flaw coming slowly .”

Phillips is a masterful maker of sweet visual dances that are never cloying, and “Until There’s Nothing, Just the Sea, a Sea of Leaves,” the last poem in this collection, is fresh, immediate and as kinetic as classic ballet, Les Sylphides not so much in drag as reimagined:

We’d been up to the meadow. The wildflowers that had
seemed everywhere had thinned gradually as we ascended, think
of an unbuttoned shirt falling in soft stages from a man’s back,
shoulders first, now the strength of a good arm showing more
and more—and the chest, of course—the meadow cresting

This is stunning, and like every image in Speak Low, it deserves a long, popular life. Walk away from these five lines reminded that you have just tasted a choice morsel that will expand your senses in unforgettable ways. The whole of the poem and the whole of the book deserve appreciative memory.

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