![]() Phillips fixes this imagined dialogue of the leaves to an instance of human narrative interest: In the first three lines, the poet has already invoked elements of lyric utterance - speech, song, silence. This is the energetic and surprising opening of his poem, “Little Shields, in Starlight.” “Maybe,” the first word, already a condition, a mistake, an imitation, ushers in the strangeness of what follows: the attribution of feeling to the leaves, the curiosity of “more far,” the trees, which have dog- and cat- in their names. Than here, said the dogwood leaves, mistaking speechįor song, to the catalpa leaves, imitating silence. Maybe there’s no need for us to go anywhere more far If their figurations are provisional and contingent, they are no less seductive: ![]() They are arguments with the self and the world - questions and reversals, attempts at definition and refinement - but they also feel skeptical of their own observations and conclusions. His poems are cerebral but also sensuous. ![]() ![]() He is among our most prolific and widely and frequently published poets, and yet, reading his poems, I sense, too, their rareness. ![]() The subject of his poems, often, is eros, and the engine of his poems, often, is argument. CARL PHILLIPS IS a poet of enchantment and persuasion. ![]()
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