Who is this Phillips person? — I wondered after reading aloud what had looked like a forbiddingly long poem in Poetry, July/August 2023. (The biographical note tells me what I dread knowing: He’s a distinguished professor of English!)

The poem, “Child of Nature,” has knocked me silly and induced a state of maudlin rapture. (Everything I jot down here I’ll surely regret as hasty over-sharing, leaving a good poem hard done by with my petty tribute. That’s my disclaimer.)

Only a dozen lines or so into “Child of Nature” did I detect blank verse — so unforced, transparent, vernacular, yet so true to measure throughout. The writer weaves internal rhyme and flashes of sonic dazzle, light-touch literary and of-the-moment cultural reference, ironic self awareness, and language-conscious wit with an extended meditation on what “nature” is and how it’s intuited by one whose roots are urban.

Starting with the line No one is ever alone with their thoughts, I had to stop reading for a moment. You know that constriction in the throat and onset of congestive nasality that signals getting all swimmy-eyed, when your next words will surely be croaky or sound like a wheeze, so you fall silent to regroup? That’s what happened before I steadied voice and followed the poem to its serene consummation:

Alone on a cliff or here beside me,
We are crowded by presence and perchance
Where listening to stream and street we hear
The other, even as one of them gleams
And the other gleams we can’t forget
One or the other; ethereal stream
And electric street are parts of the same long
Link in the same human chain. I came
To this poem, the long one, with a lot to say.
I’d sung my art before this with real zeal,
Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:
The ground, then heaven, then the weapon. Years
Passed. And now from my high window, the cliffs
And canyons of these avenues call me
Back to sing through fire for their sweet sake.

(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved