Review by Booklist Review
Since 1991, Phillips has published, on average, one collection of poetry every other year, from the enigmatic metaphysics of The Rest of Love (2004) to the refractive couplings of Double Shadow (2011). Less concerned with lofty philosophy than previous books, as interested in eros as ever, the poems Phillips gathers in Silverchest are composed in spare blocks of speech, hushed breath, soft expressions of quietude. He seems focused on stripping the work down to singular principles, as in Surrounded As We Are, Unlit, Unshadowed, in which broken syntax mimics the heavy exhalations of a momentary pause: you are still, black stars / black / scars, crossing a field that you've / crossed before. Even what remains of Phillips' impulse to push a thing into its shadow, into its opposite, is transmuted. After the Afterlife ends with the lines: Any shadows / that break break randomly across these waters. Most of the poems end with this kind of sensory impression, more sigh than exclamation, like a barn door open to an empty pasture, or wet leaves after rain.--Baez, Diego Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In Phillips' 12th collection, as in previous collections, form pushes the writing's nimble logic, with ruminations on desire and risk deploying Phillips' trademark, kinesthetic syntax. But these poems reach an unprecedented vulnerability through conversations with the past-"About nostalgia, I am/ still against it"-as through a thematic effort to reveal the link between desire and power: "Nothing in this world/ like being held, he says, turning away, meaning// I should hold him.I have been to Rome,/ I have known the body, I have watched it fall." Phillips interrogates causality and memory, exposing language as both an agent and a currency: ".I love you means, what exactly?" and "Is it days, really, or only moments ago/ that I almost told you everything,/ before remembering what that leads/ or has led to?" These hesitations are not merely rhetorical gestures; rather, doubt proves the only path to reliably exhuming the former self: "Funny how/ sorrow more often arrives before honesty, than/ the other way round. To my left, a blackness// like the past, but without the past's precision." In these gorgeous, meticulously constructed lyric poems, nature and music-motifs Phillips returns to often-take on the role of correlatives, evoking the mind's own cadence, its certainty and thaw. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
From the "squalor of leaves" in November, the "spell the leaves can make/ shuddering," and the "single leaf that/ won't stop tossing," to the stars that "each/ day become again invisible, while going nowhere" and the stars that "have been there, glittering, relentless, all along," to "Better wish again" and, a few pages later, "Make a wish," this new work from Los Angeles Book Prize winner Phillips (Double Shadow) is beautifully, breathtakingly of a piece. Despite all those wishes, this collection finds Phillips in a melancholy mood ("The snow fell like/ hope when it's been forsaken"). There's a general sense of resignation that relationships will end as they will always do ("making you wonder what fear/ is for, what prayer is"), even as the world and the stars stand by, solidly, dependably. The poems might seem too consistently downcast if it weren't for Phillips's superb craft, his ability to observe the interior and exterior worlds so keenly and infuse each line with reverberant acceptance and humanity. And then there's the little uplift at the end: the single leaf that won't stop tossing, casting its spell, is "you." VERDICT Highly recommended.-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
