Silver

Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips (Living Weapon) offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is “a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges”; “part physics, part faith, part void”; “the breath your breath takes before you breathe”; “séance and silence and science.” Poems in blank verse deliver metaphysical considerations as Phillips asks, “What forms/ First: a thing or its form? The I or me?/ The maker or the thinker?” and responds, “But now when I think of that lost thought,/ Somehow found here in the sudden and faint/ Power of sacred songs, perplexity/ Sidles in with the setting sun again.” Wordsworth’s autobiographical work explicitly inspires the volume’s long, final poem, “Child of Nature,” while in diction and sensibility, Wallace Stevens is another prominent genius loci, as the speaker roams “the shore and chatoyance of the sea stones,” or distinguishes between “the torque/ Of the bay and not the bay itself.” Elsewhere are moments of delicate, singsong probing: “Hadn’t it all/ Been something else/ Before? Something// Else somewhere/ Else to someone/ Else before?” and self-mythologizing verses: “Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:/ The ground, then heaven, then the weapon.” Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering. (Mar.)