Then the War: And Selected Poems 2007-2020 by Carl Phillips (Carcanet, £14.99)
Phillips’s new collection arrives carrying a Selected Poems on its shoulder. The 208 pages form a wonderfully compendious introduction to this major US poet. For those who have admired his work in the three decades since his debut, they are glowing confirmation that, as he enters his 60s, Phillips is writing better than ever. The poems that open Then the War are extraordinary ecological lyric verse, subtle and transformative. Invasive Species gives the plant switchgrass a voice: “Little song years remastering truth / now begins its own truth little song / deep in the night”; a poem about leaves is called Little Shields, in Starlight. This metamorphic fluidity allows us to understand our natural environment in a new way, and ensures these poems remain fully populated, by parents, lovers and friends. Phillips himself is in the frame in the reflexive sequence Among the Trees, a series of encounters with the natural world – and with love. The selection from earlier books that follows now reads as part of a single project of the utmost immediacy.
