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A Brief Review of
Double Shadow: Poems. Reviewed by Thomas Turner. |
Carl Phillip’s eleventh book of poetry, Double Shadow, is a deeply meditative collection of imagist verse that flows like a whispered secret. He uses sharp phrases and syntax to convey juxtaposed images, like a movie montage:
Wilderness. Bright cupola. Trimming the bittersweet and
raspberries along the marsh. Hands reddening easily in
the cold
of the air. The salt of it. The particular wakefulness
of pursuit-all-over-again. Yes….
(“Sacrifice is a Different Animal Altogether”)
The syntax Phillips uses, pithy thoughts stuck together in short sentences or chains of phrases, is a door into the subtext of Phillips poetry, which is classical in nature—spiritual, sexual, mythical, philosophical and fixated on the sea. In the long poem “Night” the poet imagines “against a backdrop of boats…facing into the wind” the dilemma of “an absence of choice.” This image is then related to how “human life” can be a “restless choir” which “casts forth / all over again its double shadow: now risk, and now / faintheartedness.” The poem “Civilization” uses the image of “a centuries-old / set of silver handbells that / once an altar boy swung” to remind us that “there’s an art / to everything.”
The last section of the collection fixates on the spiritual questions of the world, as if playing with the double shadows of Plato’s cave. Starting with “The Life You Save,” the poet introduces a philosophical view of what lies beyond our human sight: “After the pinefields, there’s the marsh—you can / see it / from here. And after that? History / ending; myth, as it starts / to stir. And after that?” This questioning continues in the image of “Heaven and Earth” of the self taken straight from Whitman, a “handful of notes: someone / else out there, singing? or myself singing, / and the echoing after?” The last poem, “Cathedral,” is an image of death as a spiritual and philosophical nakedness, when “suddenly—strangely—there was also no fear…No torch, no lantern—and yet no hiddenness, now. No hiding.” Open to the world, the wind, the image of death is stated as a disembodiment, a natural occurrence, a happening that has no significance except for the absence of being, as the image of spiritual nakedness is one of “leaves flew through where the wind sent them flying,” as if there was no longer a body to stand in the way anymore, and the poet, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy, takes his leave with that final line.
C. Christopher Smith is the founding editor of The Englewood Review of Books. He is also author of a number of books, including most recently How the Body of Christ Talks: Recovering the Practice of Conversation in the Church (Brazos Press, 2019). Connect with him online at: C-Christopher-Smith.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
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