'Second Acts' Looks at Carl Phillips's Cortège & Reconnaissance

In her ongoing series of reviews examining second poetry collections, Lisa Russ Spaar changes things up this round and looks at two books by Carl Phillips: his second collection Cortège and his latest title Reconnaissance (#13 for Phillips). The thread Russ Spaar finds running through Phillips's career is a certain erotics of the poem: "No contemporary poetry quite seduces like the work of the inimitable Carl Phillips, whose intimate lyric poems of pursuit, surrender, patience, ardor, restraint, beauty, loss, and suffering are inseparable from what, for lack of a better word, might be called his “designs,” his “style” — subtle, nuanced, shifting negotiations of syntax, silence, and musing — all of which can leave a reader breathless, envious, grateful." Too true. At Los Angeles Review of Books, Russ Spaar continues:

I have been waiting, therefore, since I began, over two years ago, to write this Los Angeles Review of Books “Second Acts” column — which typically pairs a newly published second book of poems with a second book of poems written 20 or more years ago — for Carl Phillips’s second book, Cortège (which appeared in 1995), to be “old” enough for inclusion in the series. By coincidence, then, I found myself in midsummer 2015 rereading Cortège when my preordered copy of Phillips’s brand-new collection, his 13th, Reconnaissance, arrived in the mail.

As I moved back and forth between Phillips’s two collections — one written in early career by a man in his mid-30s, the other on the cusp of middle age, a poet regarded by many now to be one of America’s most eminent writers — I was fascinated, as I always am, not only by the what of Phillips’s work (desire, grief, power-play, beauty-jones) but also by the how of it. By what means, what ruses, does he create in words the sensation of a sub-consciousness in numinous, ineffable dialogue with itself, while at the same time suggesting tumultuous erotic, natural, bodily, ecstatic, and elegiac forces? For this particular “Second Acts” essay, then, I elected to explore not two second books by different authors, but rather to delve in tandem into two books by one author, one his second volume, and the, well, second written two decades later.

Head to LARB now to dig into the review and doubly satisfy your Carl Phillips craving.