Reconnaisance

"What if all we do is all we/ can do?" What if it's better to see "acceptance as the too-long-/ missing counterweight/ to the staggered weightlessness/ of sorrow, regret—the old/ angers, too?" In his follow-up to Silverchest, a finalist for the International Griffin Prize, Phillips keeps asking himself such questions, and he's at once acquiescent and combative, ready to settle down and acknowledge "what I've/ called the world continues/ to pass for one" yet disagreeing (if silently) "that maybe recklessness/ is overrated" and pleading "why can't innocence/ be instead a boat, slowing coming about?" Is Phillips's interlocutor here the reader or his beloved, whose hand he mistakes "in the night, last night, as mine"? Either way, it's remarkable how these poems, as always elegant, perfectly crafted, and deeply, meditatively interior, roil with doubt, resistance, and desire beneath the surface. That silvery surface shouldn't fool anyone; Phillip opens by "show[ing] the darker/ powers I've hardly shown/ anyone" as he gathers up hurts "just behind my heart, where they blacken/ and thrive" and ends with an open-ended challenge: "I disagree. Touch not the crown—Don't touch me—".