To search for meaning here would be to negate the many meanings possible within this volume. Readers are not meant to construct meaning in the typically linear fashion. Instead, notice what repeats, what sounds are created, what sort of mood they set, the way in which words possess multiple meanings that reference each other in multiple contexts. For those searching for traditional poetry, this isn’t it. For those searching for the experience of poetry, for a view inside the head of a working poet, this may well be the volume. MORE

Phillips’ investigation of natural and synthetic structures relates the title’s “corpus” to its social nature, its subjection to ethical, spiritual, and biological principles. While this may sound like a form of belletristic connoisseurship, Phillips’ practice is rather rooted in a desire to shore cultural fragments against spiritual ruin. The language is dense and material but broken and, as in Celan’s late work, every word is edged up against an oceanic silence. The dogged naming in these poems ballasts an incomprehensible, necessary silence. In it, language becomes an object of speculation itself, a living organism with its own internal laws and powers of generation. This trust in economy and white space etches a vibrant line, one alive and vibrating, whose intense music hits a spondee then goes underground. These poems let us know that all that’s buried is not dead, and their rabbit holes of cross reference replicate the world “outside from the word.” This isn’t the lush place of Cesaire, Roethke, or Hopkins—it’s sparse and dense, the words appear as if “sucked up from the ground.” Formally, his quiet but aggressive skepticism comes crashing into his affirmative spiritual investment. “Yes” and “yea” appear a lucky and loaded seven times. Because of this twin tension and approach (and his two-fold vision of nature), Phillips extends Hopkins’ double-jointed embrace of tradition and invention. Gradually I got the hang of Phillips’ self-abnegating discipline and his seeming incarnational theory of language that shapes presence in grammatical, syntagmatic, and metrical form. So doing, they enact the swift movement of a mind caught in the act of perceiving. MORE