Wild Is the Wind

In recent collections, two-time National Book Award finalist Phillips (Renaissance) has been preoccupied with the weight of the past, but here he surpasses melancholy to present moments of crucial rethinking. "I've pretty much/ been wrong," he says, and calmly, too, as he scans what has unfolded. Throughout, Phillips balances on the knife's edge of regret but doesn't cut himself, acknowledging that "accepting our position, and understanding it/ still mattered, but not like remembering what/ the point had been." It's just that grasping that point can be tricky. Memory is a "mirage of history" and history itself something that runs over us roughshod and obdurate. "What hasn't been damaged?" the poet reflects at one point, elsewhere observing, "The sea was one thing once; the field another. Either way, something got crossed, or didn't." Can we distinguish between what's happened and how it's recalled, between what's joyously starlike and merely bald-fact star? Does it all come to nothing (so different from "not knowing exactly what it's come to")? Registering these distinctions in life takes the same rapt attention that Phillips's compact, cerebral poems require, so that we can find all his gemlike observations.