Scattered Snows, to the North: Poems

Following the Pulitzer Prize–winning Then the War, Phillips continues his ever-persuasive study of the evolving self, revealing a tentative acceptance despite the underlying sense of melancholy. In the pointed title poem, reflecting on life’s meaning(lessness), he wonders, “Does it matter that the Roman / Empire was still early in its slow / unwinding into never again?” Most of its citizens were “destined to be unremembered,” but they “filled in their drawn lives / anyway”; work is still work and their tears are like ours. Throughout, Phillips reconciles himself to who he’s become, acknowledging “a lack of warmth and compassion” on both sides as he sorts through friendships and how he pretends not to be fearful: “Some days, it works: I / almost believe myself.” The settings here are often autumnal, the natural world framing a self-understanding in ways Phillips makes striking: “By then the point of the forest was the getting through it,” he observes, and the wind bending young trees “makes me think of knowledge conquering / superstition,… / until the trees, like / fear, spring back.” But as he accepts a hard world, he also accepts its grace: “I believe in gift as much, I think, as I believe / in mastery.”