These Indicium Tales
These Indicium Tales
"Lance Phillips’ poetry takes us immediately into a carnal theater where the word and its thing stagger under the weight of their attraction for each other. Thus actions which are rational and understandable in real life, like having sex and then touching your ear, take on enthralling intensity. The drama of representation is also heightened because the visual frame is a series of quickly changing keyholes; every foreshortened view has immediacy. This is not conventional poetry, in which voluptuous intentions are pursued by means of poetic rhetoric. Lance Phillips’ poetry models consciousness itself. So description won’t do; it’s too removed and slow. Rather than reconstitute, the poet enacts; “Desire and perception meld: moist crease, sun/wasp, it filled his mouth.” We are first witnesses as now, and again now, worlds interact: “On lips here her body in birds of the air.” To read this book is to experience a series of transformations; in effect, to learn to read all over again."
-PAUL HOOVER
review of These Indicium Tales
by Jay Aquinas Thompson
The book is a splendid example of form containing argument. Phillips carefully scores his white space and capitalization to keep up a tense dance among his images: “One armAs a matter of dissonanceThe pansies’ purplish one wearies ofSent looking.” The things of the world want, above all, to be closer. “Intensely held thought amid fingers engulfing apple.”
The book is full of sex and acts of intimate seeing, but never seems to strain; after all, in Phillips’s poetry things are renewed by association. In the poem “One Loses One’s Power of Resistance Against Stimuli,” the speaker overwhelms us with images while destroying any intellectual means toward understanding he can get his hands on (symbol, embodiment, description, analogy). Then he concludes, in a sated daze, “One destroys—transformation is all around the air.” MORE
