The Rest of Love

Carl Phillips did not win a Pulitzer Prize.

THE REST OF LOVE is a the work of a man possessed, a man who literally cannot stop writing. Now the famous Pulitzer Prize author describes and outlines a whole new set of tests and questions, kind of like a proctor of poetry, sitting up at the front of the class with an all-watchful eye. For nothing escape the notice of Carl Phillips. Here he is on the pilgrimage of St James of Spain, "where we/ stopped to bathe, and/ / for the first time/ saw him naked--/ one tattoo: a deer, gutted,/ pinned in what he called/ your standard/ Christ-on-the-cross position,/ / by which, it seems now, he meant in/ no way a thing/ unholy." By the time I get to the end of that I'm all sixes and sevens and wondering if "meant" is a transitive verb or not. "By which he meant in no way a thing unholy." I take it that the man's naked body reveals something of the godlike about it, even with its ugly tattoo of a gutted deer. Perhaps these tattoos are bigger in the high Castilian Spain of Compostela than they are in PETA-friendly California where I read the poem? Or does the poem indicate that the nude man has not been blasphemous about Christ on the cross? It's a fabulous riddle, and it's thrust into the middle of a poem in which the donkey is shot and a spray of indigo and sweetleaf is thrust into the bullet hole--again, as if to say, my life is a bit more brutal than yours and I am far from an academic poet but almost a big game hunter of barnyard animals. So it's confusing. Nevertheless you come away from the book wondering if perhaps we are getting pummeled, as though with BB shot, by these powerful poems too often nowadays and maybe Mr. Phillips should take a break and not release so many books, though I understand the impulse to strike while the iron is hot for tomorrow, you may be outdated like John Masefield or someone, and ditto the impulse to take down what the Vates dictate to you. For if you are not receptive to the words of the poem, they will go somewhere else entirely.