{"id":11842,"date":"2020-08-09T21:00:40","date_gmt":"2020-08-09T20:00:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11842"},"modified":"2020-08-09T21:04:12","modified_gmt":"2020-08-09T20:04:12","slug":"carl-phillips-star-map-with-action-figures-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11842","title":{"rendered":"Carl Phillips | Star Map with Action Figures<\/em><\/strong> | reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

 <\/p>\n

Carl Phillips |\u00a0<\/b>Star Map with Action Figures |\u00a0<\/b><\/i>Sibling Rivalry Press, $12.00; <\/b>Pale Colours in a Tall Field, <\/b><\/i>FSG, $23.00<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n

At a recent reading, Carl Phillips suggested that Star Map with Action Figures<\/i> was like an EP; a selection of poems that wouldn\u2019t really fit on an LP length book such as Pale Colours in a Tall Field. <\/i>There is an abstract quality to the poems in Star Map<\/i> which sometimes feels as if it lacks the physical precision and empathy with and knowledge of the natural world which threads through Pale Colours. <\/i>It\u2019s not that the poems in Star Map<\/i> are any the less emotionally and intellectually precise than the ones in Pale Colours<\/i>. It\u2019s just that the poems in the pamphlet are perhaps more cerebral, an exploration of what it means to think things through. In the full length book, we are treated to that connection between inner nature and outer nature; a connection which is, perhaps, shown in the very title itself, Pale Colours in a Tall Field. <\/i>Those \u2018pale\u2019 colours are part of a \u2018colour field\u2019, but they are also present in a field that contains sycamores, silverrod, tickseed and pear trees, and, as often in Phillips, horses both grazing and running. <\/span><\/p>\n

In Phillip\u2019s book of essays, The Art of Daring, <\/i>he comments: <\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0The irresolvability of an abstraction like power, combined with the very real,
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0human\u00a0<\/span>impulse to give shapelessness a form, is the catalyst for the particular
\n    \u00a0field of inquiry that we call art \u2013 in this case, poetry \u2013 and the inquiry is an
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0ongoing one, across history, because the \u201cproblem\u201d being investigated resists
\n<\/span>\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0solution, and yet we as humans can\u2019t resist trying to find solutions.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Art of Daring<\/i> is not simply a kind of manifesto for the \u2018recklessness\u2019 that it espouses as a subtitle, and neither is it only a map around Phillips\u2019 own poetry. What Phillips does is to look at the way energy, perhaps shapelessness, manifests itself in poets such as Hart Crane and Shelley, poets for whom we might assume that Phillips has some natural sympathy. Phillips also writes about a poet like Lorine Niedecker, a poet whose name and poetics we might not immediately connect with Phillips\u2019s charge and drive. That sense of giving \u2018shapelessness a form\u2019, of channelling energy so that it becomes approachable but never domesticated, permeates much of Phillips\u2019 poetry even where it commemorates loss, as Phillips sees in some of Niedecker\u2019s poems. <\/span><\/p>\n

\u2018All the Love you\u2019ve Got\u2019 from Star Map <\/i>shows that sense of form in all its presence. In the poem, Phillips imagines that \u2018the king has stepped \/ from the royal tent, is walking toward the sound \/ of water, where the river must be \u2026 Beside the river, \/ two men are fucking.\u2019 What the king notices is that \u2018the men bring a somehow grace \/ to the business between them.\u2019 Although it is not clear that the lines that follow are the interior reflections of the king, their semblance to free indirect speech means that the words seem to emerge from the king, himself. Thus, the men\u2019s fucking has a kind of music, \u2018It\u2019s as if \/ they\u2019re singing a song that might go, \u201cI\u2019m the king, no you\u2019re \/ the king and I\u2019m the river, no you\u2019re the river.\u201d On and on, like that. Leave them: they do \/\/ no harm.\u2019 So the king who \u2018knows mercy when he sees it\u2019, witnesses the trading of power, in the form of love making. And the grace of the men\u2019s actions shows the king how grace and mercy might lead to a tenderness that culminates in the final sentence of the poem, \u2018How soft the stars look.\u2019 If there is a solution to the particularities of power outlined in this poem, it is a solution which looks to grace and tenderness, but without sentimentality. By viewing the two men fucking through the lens of the mythical king, Phillips removes a possibly voyeuristic element to focus on the palpable, human tenderness that act has for him. As he writes at the beginning of the poem, this \u2018means \/ being a stranger, at least outwardly, to even the least \/ trace of doubt\u2019.<\/span><\/p>\n

Perhaps, it is too easy to suggest that these poems are actually haunted by the political situation that Phillips finds himself in. If power is an irresolvable abstraction, then, as he notes, \u2018we as humans can\u2019t resist trying to find solutions.\u2019 Part of Phillips\u2019 technique is to watch how power manifests itself in animals. This manifestation is not only present in the horse mentioned earlier. However, Phillips certainly loves horse for the power they do manifest. This is not just a physical power. In the poem, \u2018Tugging the Arrow out\u2019, he writes, <\/span><\/p>\n

There\u2019s a nudging that a living horse
\n<\/span>will sometimes extend toward a dead one,
\n<\/span>\u00a0 a nudging not so much against death \u2013 what is
\n<\/span>knowable to a horse, but not understandable \u2013
\n<\/span>but against that space right before loneliness
\n<\/span>\u00a0 settles in for real that horses
\n<\/span>do, it seems, understand. <\/span><\/p>\n

A horse is a large and visible enough animal to observe this kind of psychology at play, perhaps. Perhaps, also, that size and visibility, their ubiquity for humans with whom they have a particular kind of relationship, shows that horse behaviour might be analogous to human behaviour. Loneliness, and the sheer isolation of the human condition are recurrences in Phillips\u2019 poems. Thus, if even the admirable horse understands loneliness then the horse shows how humans need to acknowledge loneliness, too. <\/span><\/p>\n

Phillips depicts the horse representing a kind of centred-ness in \u2018Since when shall speak of it no more\u2019; here, quoted whole. <\/span><\/p>\n

– Clouds like the manes of stallions, the mane alive still
\n<\/span>on the stallion\u2019s ghost-body. As if the body had died, I mean,
\n<\/span>and the mane forgotten to. Or been weirdly stranded. I\u2019m
\n<\/span>no one\u2019s horse. I\u2019m not what waves like a bit of ocean down
\n<\/span>and to either side of its brindled neck. I\u2019m not a thing I know. <\/span><\/p>\n

Again, it is the dead horse which figures large in this text. The horse is clearly designated as male at the beginning of the poem, but central to this is that the horse has a primordial unity, the disintegration from which mirrors the narrator\u2019s own disintegration. Not only is the mane somehow cloud-like, the horse\u2019s body is a ghost of the former horse. In the midst of this, the narrator tells us that he is \u2018no-one\u2019s horse\u2019; he is unpossessed either by another, or, it seems, even by himself. Although the imagery of the dead horse might seem unusual, the poem shows almost by not showing, that the horse had and has a coherence which the narrator does not, \u2018I\u2019m not a thing I know.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n

In \u2018Defiance\u2019, Phillips comments that \u2018Some say the point of war \/ is to make the need for tenderness \/\/ more clear.\u2019 And Phillips uses the example of how, in the Iliad<\/i>, \u2018the horse\u2019s head, \/\/ to protect it from combat, would be fitted \/ with a shaffron, a strip of steel, \/ sometimes mixed with copper, all of it \/\/ hammer-worked, parts detailed \/ in gold.\u2019 What Phillips then goes on to explore is the way statements, particularly of love, may actually dissemble, not to trouble but to protect. And the poem ends with a kind of coda separated from the main body of the poem, \u2018And turned to him. \/\/ And took his hand \u2013 the scarred one; I could \/ feel the scars \u2026 Little crowns. Mass \/\/ coronation. For by then all the lilies in the pond had opened.\u2019 <\/span><\/p>\n

If Phillips is a metaphysical poet, his metaphysics actually never avoid the physical. That the horse, or two men fucking might encapsulate ideas of what is tender or how we are more or less a unity within ourselves seems like a statement of the obvious. Phillips\u2019 particular triumph is to show how we need to suspend our judgement about not only these physical acts but also what they might suggest about the human condition. Phillips depictions of the human condition are formed under conditions of extraordinary acceptance. This is not indifference, but a deeply particularised compassion. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

by Ian Pople<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Carl Phillips |\u00a0Star Map with Action Figures |\u00a0Sibling Rivalry Press, $12.00; Pale Colours in a Tall Field, FSG, $23.00 At a recent reading, Carl Phillips suggested that Star Map with Action Figures was like an EP; a selection of poems that wouldn\u2019t really fit on an LP length book such as Pale Colours in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":[]},"categories":[13,283],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\nCarl Phillips | Star Map with Action Figures | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=11842\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Carl Phillips | Star Map with Action Figures | reviewed by Ian Pople - The Manchester Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"  Carl Phillips |\u00a0Star Map with Action Figures |\u00a0Sibling Rivalry Press, $12.00; 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