Silverchest by Carl PhillipsFarrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013

I was going to say that “so what?” is the question of this book—it appears twice in “Blizzard” and again in “Your Body Down in Gold”, and I do think there’s something to that. Phillips, in these poems, is concerned with what matters and what doesn’t, with the vagaries of love and desire, with the things people say and the things people mean, and with the everyday world, the natural world as well as the human, the world of starlings and cottonwood trees and crepe myrtles. The poems themselves are an answer to “so what?”: so here we are, so here we are in this world, so let’s pay attention.

But actually, these poems are full of questions, not just that one: in 35 poems I counted 29 questions, and that’s not even counting the ones not phrased with question marks, like this, from “Shimmer”: “When did souvenirs of what happened start/becoming tokens of what/could have been becomes/one of those questions that, more and more, I keep/forgetting to stop asking.” Some of the questions are succinct: “Has it come to this again/already?” or “I love you/means what, exactly?” or “why do we love, at all?”, while others meander and sprawl, like this stanza-and-a-bit from “Distraction”:

			     You know how, when the light
flashes off water, then passes through it, then rubs against,
it can seem just like the mind in a fix thinking its way
out of a fix, or at least trying to, the way Virgil in his
big poem describes it, and for a moment you think

everything's new that's been known forever—swamp-thistle,
bull-thistle, touch-me-not, red clover?

I like how many questions there are, and I like the uncertainty or ambivalence that Phillips captures in other ways, too: there are multiple poems in which something is or isn’t, or happens or doesn’t, or is and isn’t. In his review of Silverchest in the April 15, 2013 issue of the New Yorker, Dan Chiasson writes of these poems as Phillips’s way of “tracking the heart’s false starts, close shaves, and dead ends,” and I think that a major way Phillips does that is through the language: the questions and ambivalence and ambiguity that I like so much.

If you’re curious to read more, several of the poems are available online in one form or another. You can watch/listen to Phillips reading the book’s first poem, “Just the Wind for a Sound, Softly,” here: I really like the mix of concrete and oblique, and the sense of time passing: a season, many seasons. I like “Bluegrass” for the crispness of the image of the second stanza and the conversational tone of the first. And I already linked to “Blizzard” but here it is again: I love the lines about the starlings and their shadows on a frozen pond, and also the last ten lines, which are a translation of/variation on a poem attributed to the Roman emperor Hadrian.