{"id":9257,"date":"2018-04-05T15:09:44","date_gmt":"2018-04-05T14:09:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9257"},"modified":"2018-04-05T15:10:46","modified_gmt":"2018-04-05T14:10:46","slug":"carl-phillips-wild-is-the-wind-reviewed-by-ian-pople","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.themanchesterreview.co.uk\/?p=9257","title":{"rendered":"Carl Phillips, Wild is the Wind<\/em>, reviewed by Ian Pople"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carl Phillips, Wild is the Wind<\/em>, FSG $23.00<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u2018Wild is the Wind\u2019 is one of the great songs from the American Songbook. Originally recorded by Johnny Mathis for the film of the same name, it has picked up a range of interpreters from Nina Simone and David Bowie, to Bat For Lashes, Esperanza Spalding and Dame Shirley Bassey. Simone\u2019s interpretation is one of the most haunting, if only because Nina Simone was a singer who inhabited a song. And Simone certainly inhabits the song\u2019s slow cadences, which she underpins with her own \u2018dramatic\u2019 pianism. On Nina Simone\u2019s album of the same name, \u2018Wild is the Wind\u2019 is followed by an equally dramatic, but far more minimalist version of \u2018Black is the Colour of My True Love\u2019s Hair\u2019. Both versions are live performances. Carl Phillips\u2019 title poem to his new collection genuflects to that version in its exploration of memory and loss, in a way which situates him not only in relation to Simone but also to the poetic tradition, <\/p>\n

\u2018For the metaphysical poets, the problem
\nwith weeping for what\u2019s been lost is that tears
\nwash out memory and, by extension, what we\u2019d hoped
\nto remember. If I refuse, increasingly, to explain, isn\u2019t
\nexplanation, at the end of the day, what the studier
\ntruths resist? It\u2019s been my experience that
\ntears are useless against all of the rest of it that, if I
\ncould, I\u2019d forget. <\/p>\n

Whether the first person here is a persona adopted by Phillips, or the empirical Phillips, himself, is a moot point; Phillips\u2019 taut and slightly driven syntax certainly feels personal. And what the poem offers is an exploration of a kind of truth. That Phillips is so successful in persuading the reader that she is reading truths is down to the precision and elegance of that syntax. The reader is taken in at the start of the sentence, the verse paragraph, the whole poem and then let go at the end. To read Carl Phillips is, as has been said by others, to be read by him. Phillips\u2019 querulous, querying syntax seems to inhabit part of the human condition. <\/p>\n

In his contribution to The Art of Series<\/em>, The Art of Daring: Risk, Restlessness, Imagination<\/em>, Phillips comments, \u2018I believe reality can become distorted past recognition, and it\u2019s in these moments that only something like daring, a willingness to risk going forward when we hardly know where we are, can provide us the chance both of self-knowledge and for the making of art. Restlessness carries us to penetration \u2013 we pierce the world as we knew it, the world as we\u2019ve never known it pierces us, in turn, daring pushes past this\u2026 and then what?\u2019 <\/p>\n

In suggesting that \u2018reality can become distorted past recognition\u2019, Phillips suggests that, firstly, we know what reality actually is, and secondly, as a consequence of that knowledge, we know that distortion is taking place at all. For Phillips, that distortion leads to \u2018self-knowledge and the making of art\u2019. <\/p>\n

In a recent reading, Phillips commented that one of his friends had told him that he, Phillips, included \u2018too much of the natural world\u2019 in his poems. Wild is the Wind<\/em>, as opposed to his previous Reconnaissance, certainly contains far less of the natural world; and leaves the natural world in order to more fully explore \u2018self-knowledge\u2019. Thus, it is perhaps slightly misleading to call Phillips a \u2018metaphysical\u2019 poet, as in this book, he is the poet of self-knowledge as emotional intelligence. Such intricate explorations of emotional intelligence drive his style, that lapidary syntax, which can run a single sentence through a single poem of fifteen long lines, such as \u2018At Bay\u2019 from Reconnaissance. The syntax is driven by the restlessness mentioned in the quotation above, and that restlessness driving to penetration occasions the further need for the intricate syntax. Thus the sentence structure is mimetic of that \u2018pierc[ing] of the world as we knew it\u2019, so that in turn, \u2018the world as we\u2019ve never known it pierces us\u2019; all of this driven by the \u2018daring\u2019 Phillips so champions. <\/p>\n

Phillip\u2019s piercing emotional intelligence leads him to lay his own life on the line. And as a gay man, such an exploration becomes an Audenesque quest into the meaning of love, as in these lines from \u2018Revolver\u2019, <\/p>\n

\t\tHis face
\nwas a festival, within which \u2013 just as
\ntenderness is only sometimes
\nweakness, or how what we were
\ncan become unrecognizable to what we are,
\nor think we are – leaves swam in the air. <\/p>\n

The image of the face as festival and the leaves swimming in the air are repetitions from earlier in the poem. But inside that repetition is the turning of insight upon insight; a double folding in order to unfold. Phillips\u2019 syntax here contains the turning of the mind upon itself, which might seem a kind of neurosis were it not that, as we have seen above, the reader both colludes in and recognises herself in this. The poet is reading the reader; reading the reader\u2019s own inquiry into their own tendernesses, their own weaknesses. <\/p>\n

The physical world is not quite absent from this book, although there isn\u2019t quite the fluent movement from natural to metaphysical that there was in the previous book, Reconnaissance. \u2018Before the Leave turn back\u2019 begins, <\/p>\n

Though I\u2019ve shot the owl down, it hasn\u2019t stopped its trembling,
\nso I have to still it. I cup my hand as for a shield, a sign-both-
\nuntil it looks like my idea, at least, of mercy beside the one
\nwing where I\u2019ve broken it\u2026<\/p>\n

and the poem ends, \u2018The only sound for miles is the sound of finishing.\u2019 <\/p>\n

The shooting of an owl feels like an act of shocking violence, particularly when followed by the second half of that line; there are few better examples of Phillips\u2019 skill than the sheer, physical revulsion that image provokes. And it might be, also, that Phillips\u2019 further exploration of his own actions as \u2018shield\u2019 and \u2018sign\u2019 might seem an artistic special pleading too far. When Phillips comments \u2018it looks like my idea, at least, of mercy\u2019, he opens himself up to the criticism that this is no mercy at all. However, Phillips deepens the exploration of emotional intelligence with this laying of his own behaviour open. And that final line suggests the toll such actions ultimately exact. <\/p>\n

Such laying bare, also, belies the comment that Phillips\u2019 writing is cerebral, that he is, simply, a contemporary metaphysical. He is not a confessional poet, either, but seems extraordinarily equipped to understand what confession really entails. In a time of strong man politics and a world easing itself towards ecological catastrophe, Phillips involves us all in calm, mature and poised explorations of what love really means. His explorations of emotional intelligence in an age of chaos feel like a contemporary Four Quartets. <\/p>\n

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

Carl Phillips, Wild is the Wind, FSG $23.00 \u2018Wild is the Wind\u2019 is one of the great songs from the American Songbook. 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