In his 17th book of poetry, Scattered Snows, to the North, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carl Phillips gazes both inward and outward. His work carries a signature heft, a musicality and syntax that seems to rewrite itself with each read. Phillips tangles his sentences like few other poets working today, and often, rather than untangling them, he lets the tangles linger, clause-heavy and potent, wordy but exacting. The knots he makes with lines, stanzas, images and always-startling juxtaposition are graceful but not easy. One of the distinct pleasures of reading his work is getting lost in the questions it poses, and Scattered Snows, to the North is full of questions.
The speaker of “Searchlights” embodies the contradictions at the heart of this work: “I can see the words, though I can’t / hear them, finding shape first, then meaning, the way smoke does, / Don’t, which is not a question; then just the smell of the rain, which is.” How does the memory of a relationship, or a place, or a particular moment reshape it? Can the present change the past? Why do we fixate on memory, rework the contours of a life over and over again in the mind? What changes as we age, and how do we reckon with what doesn’t? These questions hum through the poems, surfacing and retreating. Always, Phillips engages with them at a slant: “Why not call it love— // each gesture—if it does love’s work? I pulled him / closer. I kissed his mouth, its anger, its blue confusion.”
Phillips beautifully articulates the thorny conflict between reflecting on and being present in: reflecting on time passing while being present in your body; reflecting on the cyclical sameness of human history while being present in the specific ecstasy of a season, a love, a quarrel, the beach at night. The settings of these poems often feel mythological—fields and forests—but they also feel distinctly current. Nature is everywhere, and always changing; there are animals in various stages of life, the turbulent sea, weather, light.
The titular poem, “Scattered Snows, to the North,” is a poignant meditation on loss both intimate and universal. In considering the people who lived during the failing years of the Roman Empire, the speaker muses: “If it was night, they lit / fires, presumably. Tears / were tears.” In “Stop Shaking,” Phillips asks, “What if memory’s just the dead, flourishing differently from how they flourished alive?” Over and over the poems echo one another, alighting on some philosophical truth and then returning, humbled, to the material world.