Fragmentation has been an obsession of modern poetry in English since Eliot's "The Wasteland" invented modern poetry in English by now it is something of a cliche. It would be natural here to speak of a larger whole, but that would suggest a kind of coherence and unity, and I doubt that Phillips' skeptical and at times despairing sensibility will allow us that comfort. His poems - those in "Double Shadow" in particular - feel less like complete individual works and more like fragments of something larger. The world of "Double Shadow" is an old world, a faded, tired and depleted world: it is late in the day, the major events have already happened, the light is fading, and darkness will soon be upon us.Ī volume of Phillips' selected poems, Quiver of Arrows, appeared quietly in 2007 and seemed to slip mostly under the radar, which is a shame: his work is quiet, and at times difficult, but its fragile beauty is unique and at times overwhelming. But where Ashbery's universe is a theater of nihilistic yet playful hijinks, Phillips' is a somber, autumnal landscape, one that is illuminated by moments of ephemeral, ethereal beauty. In some ways the perpetually shifting textures and shardlike quality of Phillips' language are reminiscent of John Ashbery, that pre-eminent poet of modern consciousness. What seems to be outside, and what we often wish were outside, is really an intrusion from within. Between the slender consciousness we identify with and the unconscious bulk that makes up the remainder of what one is, there sometimes arise vast and profoundly alienating gulfs. Lyric poets are explorers of inner landscapes as well as outer ones, and the lines between inner and outer are very often hard to discern. The idea of an encounter between the self and the world is problematic anyway, because the - 'world' one is confronted with is so often some aspect of the self.
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