Breakdown Lane

Phillips's ( Personal Accounts ) fifth collection of verse is about loss and lost directions in a life of diminished expectations. In the title poem, he writes of being passed on a highway by a brother, father, wife, rival; when his confident younger self drove by, it ``really hurt.'' The poem concludes: ``I'll just stagger / toward the horizon, not / knowing what's ahead . . . / or why I am crying.'' A sequence of poems called ``An Affair with the Muse'' documents love found and lost, but here Phillips's passion lacks energy. His loss seems less important than it might be. ``Happiness,'' perhaps the most successful of the love poems, gives us ``sunrise in Eden,'' while the next poem in the sequence laments, ``You could have answered just one of my letters.'' The last of the book's four sections, ``American Elegies,'' offers poetry written for Charles Ives, the art critic John I.H. Baur, and the poets Howard Moss and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as other poems, among them one about stray socks in the laundry: ``Learn to count on nothing.'' In the elegy for Rukeyser, Phillips writes: ``Her poems still burn.'' Clearly, the lives of those concerned with art rouse his enthusiasm. But as a whole, this book fails to generate much heat. (May)