Scattered Snows, To the North

Carl Phillips
(Carcanet Press, 2024); pbk, £11.99

Carl Phillips asks in ‘Foliage’, ‘When did syntax and life become indistinguishable from one another?’ Art and Life: poetry as the transformation (not transcription) of experience in words. In reading Scattered Snows, to the North, I shall take my cue from Phillips’ essay. For these are thoughtful, expansive, if sometimes also frustrating to read, new poems made up of lengthy, sinewy sentences and syntax… a muscular intellect tethered to a body that loves, desires, and also decays. Tethered to—to use Yeats’ beautiful phrase—that ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’….

Phillips’ images expand outwards, complicating, rather than subordinating what came before…

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