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March 10, 2000 | "In a field," Mark Strand famously claimed, "I am the absence of field." Put Carl Phillips in a field, on the other hand, and absence is the last thing on his mind. In "Pastoral," fields and the animals that run through them represent Phillips' fertile vision of the intersection of desire, loss and morality. Trying to make sense of how the three impinge upon one another has been Phillips' project in his three previous books, and he continues it here as a way of investigating the nature of longing.

Phillips gathers his concerns together in the book's opening poem, which describes "A Kind of Meadow":

-- shored
by trees at its far ending,
as is the way in moral tales:

whether trees as trees actually,
for their shadow and what
inside of it

hides, threatens, calls to;
or as ever-wavering conscience,
cloaked now, and called Chorus;

or between these, whatever
falls upon the rippling and measurable,
but none to measure it, thin

fabric of this stands for.

What Phillips' meadow "stands for" is a kind of stage on which human emotion and entanglements are played out, something akin to the forest in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," but darker. Whimsy and comedic relief are nowhere to be found. Throughout "Pastoral," there is frequent wrestling with God and the body (described, memorably, as "wild loam" at one point), and much shoring up against the inevitable damage that occurs over every lifetime. In "Abundance," Phillips asks with urgency:

Remember the buck, stepping free

of the dark wood,
of the wood's shadow, as if
just for you? And the antlers, you said simply,

branching like hands or
like trees.
I thought of the branching of mistake when

presumed over,
forgotten,
on all sides at once it sports a fist

full of blooms.

What you must call the blooms,
call them. Prayers; these willed disclosures.

Phillips is a master of allegory, and he's able to sustain his power even when he sends his creations off the page and into the world. In "Hymn," the stag returns, and Phillips uses it as a steppingstone to the emotional core of his poem. Returning to his dusky field once more, he writes:

Less the shadow
than you a stag, sudden, through it.
Less the stag breaking cover than

the antlers, with which
crowned.
Less the antlers as trees leafless,

to either side of the stag's head, than --
between them -- the vision that must
mean, surely, rescue.

Less the rescue.
More, always, the ache
toward it.

It's an elegant game of leapfrog, and Phillips' symbolism and inverted syntax do nothing to diminish the force of the argument he's making: To be human is to wallow forever in the knowledge that we cannot love -- or save -- each other nearly as well or as much as we'd like to.

Indeed, wants and the manner in which they go unfulfilled play a large part in "Pastoral." In the first poem of a series called "And Fitful Memories of Pan," Phillips bemoans the inevitability of succumbing to desire: "The argument that rules out/excess must be/a slim one, for see/how easily, again, I have/ignored it." Wanting makes him feel like "that thing the gods do what they will with," and he ends the poem on a wistful note:

wantlessness,
the curse of hunger its
obverse, rubbed naturally

past luster:
custom weighs
more than shine -- as,

more than custom
weighs loss, that field that,
if of late I step outside it,

I shall return to at that hour
when, if light could ache, most
achingly the light

tips across it.

"Pastoral" is a gorgeous book, shocking, at moments, for its beauty. It consitutes its own world, one tinged with mysticism but still firmly rooted in reality. Phillips has achieved something noble by creating this little universe. With their parablelike simplicity, his poems rise far above the crowd of verses down on earth.

Next page | The thrill of escape