Uncommon Prayers for Joy

A Sunday night, December 2011. I am in Camp Nou, home of FC Barcelona. I have managed to get amongst the socios, the hardcore fans, and am *this* close to the touchline that Lionel Messi is marauding up and down. I don’t have many memories of that night or the game – Wikipedia says Levante were thumped 5-0. What has lingered: the way Messi moved through the match; a shuffling gait punctuated by blazes of fire as he left opposing defenders for dead. Then did it again and again and again.

You can see from the above how difficult it is to put physical genius into words. ‘La Pulga’ (‘The Flea’), one of the standout poems in Silver, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s fourth collection, does this for Messi brilliantly. Through the poem, Phillips is fully aware of how the player’s audacity renders people speechless (‘And it’s like your name itself calls for the ball. / And it too knows who you are / As you balance in this field of the lord and focus / Because what you’re about to do has no name.’), how what Messi does becomes a phenomenon to be worshipped (‘as all things within the sight of Jupiter / Belong to Jupiter, the ball arrives to you.’), and how this glut of magic has rendered us sated. It’s hands down one of the best poems about football I’ve read.

The rest of the book doesn’t quite live up to this bravura moment, but there are many other delights to be found within it, not least Phillips’s ability to turn moments from pop culture into something grander. In ‘The Triumph of Song’ he takes his first hearing of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, and turns that memory – ‘All that confident lack of confidence’ – into an ars poetica:

Which is what writing poems is really like:
The dark blood zoning forwards and backwards
In the brain, the heart like grass in a bowl,
And the burning horizon’s sharp swagger

All of it part physics, part faith, part void.

Another is his inventive spirit, on show in pieces such as ‘The First and Final Poem Is the Sun’, the broken specular poem that opens and closes the book, and ‘The Immortal Marsyas’, which undercuts the eponymous myth in two lines, the poem in full reading: ‘O, silver-lyred Apollo // gimme that’. 

Phillips has a gift for economically examining a big theme in ways that illuminate. In ‘Paradise Lost’, his narrator, while seemingly aware of the costs of this (‘I start with sorrow, / Then feign joy’) manages to capture the animating spirit of the USA in nine lines:

Be… Could be…
But the trick,
You see, is to say

That this has never
Been done before,
That it simply sprung up

From some uninhabited
Space: this epic of epics,
This American song.

The flip side of this is that he can lapse into forging unearned epigrams, such as in ‘Biographia Literaria’, which posits that the writer being addressed should(?) or must(?) ‘know, deep in your heart, that every poem has already been written.’ Or the reach for a moment of transcendence that, however hard the reader looks, just isn’t there, such as in ‘Romanticism’, where the persona ‘Burns my nose, as I lean against the [window’s] glass / For one brief glimpse of God in this world’.

You are minded to forgive Phillips because, when it comes to what really matters, he knows. Able to summon beauty in what feels a click of the fingers (‘Or the soft hustle of those languished stars / That in a sky-blue hex evaporate’ (‘A Brief History of Barcelona’)). Able to find a quiet elegance even in the brutality of a COVID death:

I joined her
where Charon sat at a makeshift table

killing time with his dog in the foyer,
playing dominoes by himself, waiting
under the faint spectral light of a coy star;
                    (‘Postlude’)

Most of all though, he has the blessed trick of putting into words what you know matters, but can’t say yourself – or rather, as he much more felicitously phrases it in ‘Key West’, the things, ‘Like the apocryphal songs of yacht rock / Which mean nothing to you until they do.’

The blurb for Carl Phillips’s seventeenth collection, his first since winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2023, is centred on ‘vulnerability: the value of embracing it and thus releasing ourselves from the compulsion to understand our past.’ This sounds like quite the straitjacket for any poet to be putting themselves into. Of course, Phillips has the intellect, rigour, and musicality to attempt – and mostly succeed – in using this constraint. But, to my eyes and ears at least, a little something – a warmth – has been sacrificed. Perhaps unsurprising in a book that has ‘snow’ in its title, I found this a chilly collection. One that, to coin the reviewing cliché, you absolutely admire but struggle to warm to.

Phillips can reframe an image, object, or subject, then make this new perspective seem as natural as breathing; indeed, he can make you doubt why you ever thought about the subject in a different way at all. In the opening poem ‘Regime’, which puts us mid-scene where a couple is undressing, it could be a seduction or them getting ready to turn in for the night. It is raining, which prompts the narrator to reflect on the fact that he is not hearing wind blow the autumn leaves off the river birch. And then comes the leap:

                      It’s hard
to believe in them,
the beautiful colors

of extinction; but 
these are the colors.

For you, the pageant of the golden leaves is one of beauty and wonder. For this persona: death first, forever. It’s a breathtaking, resonant shift.

This is also of a piece with another of Phillips’s strongest suits, the delicate way in which he makes the grandest of claims. ‘The air stirs like history // Like the future // Like history’ (‘Before All of This’), for example, or the knotty existentialism of ‘Fall Colors’: ‘I almost believe in the self that’s just an imitation of a self I want others to believe in enough for me eventually to believe it, too. Believing in, versus believing…’

When it catches, boy does it catch. ‘Vikings’ is a tour de force in how it blends mythology, etymology, causal sex, and the rumination on the passing of time, in a chewy, restless, expansive sonnet: ‘I’d watch / the yard fill with leaves, then with what I at first thought was / urgency, though it usually turned out just to be ambition.’

The Forward Prize-nominated title poem remains wonderful, and in the context of the book gains a greater lustre, its blend of unflinching honesty in the face of the world’s true indifference to us giving it the air of one of Marcus Aurelius’s meditations. People, the Roman Empire:

                                most of them
destined to be unremembered,
who filled their drawn lives
anyway—because what else
is there?—to where the edges
gave out.
                    (‘Scattered Snows, to the North’)

His yoking of some of the grandest themes in human history to intimate contexts – some joyful, but most commonplace, confused, cold with much actually unsaid, while also daring to say the natural world doesn’t care all that much for you either – is audacious, and mostly works. When a significant chunk of contemporary poetry is presented, by design or not, as ‘the art of self help’, the rigour of Phillips’s thinking and the tone he strikes is akin to having a bucket of water chucked over your head: refreshing, potentially uplifting, but also a bit too bracing as an alarm call.

At no point does Phillips let the reader off lightly; these are not poems of easy wisdom or much comfort. But in their astringency is plenty of beauty, and insight that you know will stay with you. Here’s the end of ‘When We Get There’ (oddly, not in the associated section of the book): ‘The ospreys / slept in their nests, presumably: for omens / also need sleep; indeed, the best ones can sleep for years, uninterrupted.’

Anthony Vahni Capildeo’s latest book, Polkadot Wounds, arrives divided into three sections: ‘landskips’, ‘Commedia’, and ‘Gentle housework of the sacrifice’. It feels that it’s the word ‘skips’ that is the key to the collection: the suggestion of play inherent in the word, the sense of moving lightly across and through spaces, and also a notion that something is being given up, shed, left behind. It’s a tribute to Capildeo’s unmatched skill as a poet that these ideas and themes surface with the gentlest of touches, and we are guided through a book where – dare one say it – they appear to be having fun. This happens right from the off, in ‘Summer, Launceston’, a poem commissioned by the Charles Causely Trust, inspired by the statue of the local martyr St Cuthbert Mayne. Here are uppercase letters set as carvings, and yet instead of a solid, unyielding inscription we have something more fluid, optimistic – uplifting – despite, or perhaps because of, the ‘SELF-STRIPPING THORNS’ that trigger some sort of transformation: ‘NOBODY’S REAL / FACE EXISTS ♢ YET ♢ POLKADOT / WOUNDS ♢ WHERE STONE ♢ RUNS / ♢ LIKE HONEY’.

Capildeo has always been a bit of genius when it comes to finding sounds on the page, and making something unexpected from them. Take ‘Visit’, where the voice declares, 

love there are times
you’d lose your head
so many in conversation
woodgrain with buttered
dna with waveform 

Now I can’t give you an actual meaning to those last two lines, but what I can tell you is that they have been hovering in my mind’s eye for weeks since reading them, as I see helixes careening around planks, insects running up them… and I love that Capildo repeatedly has this effect on me as a reader.

Their humour is sometimes overlooked too, and I found plenty across the book, though nothing made me laugh out loud as much as this run from ‘Fiddleheads’, when the speaker is at Mount Fuji, in the midst of a journey to the deep North:

Cats at a certain age upgrade to being demons.
(We did not mean to witness
the prince of darkness in a fiery cloak,
hauling himself to birth behind the bar, –
walking backwards and inverted, buttocks upward, 
arms pressed into service as dissected-lily feet;
nor his opening out again to smash the stage.)

The mood darkens as the book progresses. ‘Commedia’ is best thought of as series of riffs inspired by Dante, jagging off into different directions: haunting, argumentative, surreal. And beautiful too, as in ‘Purple’, a taxonomy ‘as if departure was a texture’: ‘an embarrassment of amethysts / a rental of incandescence / a portcullis of contracts / a tall ship of suggestibility / an unconscious of exclusion’. 

‘Gentle housework of the sacrifice’ revolves around transformations, of the self especially, creating through its poems moments of grace as genders and pronouns are gently interrogated, and a new space is opened up for the ‘I’ figure, ‘loving beyond bodyshame’ as ‘Mike, Swimming’ has it, ‘flexing   not as the angels / but as cathedrals do   stone / through which light is expressed’. But do not think there is a passive or self-pitying tone to these conversations. Glorious notes of defiance are also to be heard, such as in ‘Ecologies of Attention’: ‘editor! they’re on / the world stage! / laughing! and dancing! / when you know! / their body language! / should be pain! / cotton! cobblestone! pain! / editor! they’re speaking! / editorially! again!’

The more time you spend with the collection, the greater the unshakable feeling that it is a book of uncommon prayers, powered by the belief that through the fun of observing and naming things, they can become holy, especially if this observation and naming is done with wit and generosity, an openness of heart and spirit. Capildeo, characteristically, puts it far better, in ‘Weather Systems’:

when day breaks
it will not be mended with gold,
it will be infinitely more
precious, and perhaps survivable.