Carl Phillips has now published fifteen collections of poetry, each one a continuation of a project so singular and so sustained that reading him across the arc of his career feels like watching a long argument with oneself gradually resolve into something approaching understanding — though "resolution" is perhaps too strong a word for what Phillips arrives at, which is usually a harder-won and more provisional clarity. Scattered Snows, to the North continues that argument with his characteristic mixture of lyric beauty, intellectual pressure, and honest self-questioning.
The Phillips project
Phillips has always been interested in the relationship between desire and power — in the dynamics of dominance and submission, not just in erotic contexts but as a general principle of how one thing affects another: weather on landscape, memory on the present, one person's will on another's freedom. These are not abstract concerns. His poems are grounded in the physical — in weather, in the body, in specific landscapes most often drawn from the natural world of the American Northeast — and they use that grounding to locate the metaphysical pressures he's most interested in.
Syntax and power
What distinguishes Phillips from almost any other poet writing in English today is his syntax. His sentences are long, recursive, self-interrupting — they double back, qualify, subdivide — and reading them requires a particular kind of active attention. They mirror, formally, the quality of mind they describe: a mind that cannot settle for the first formulation, that keeps testing what it has said, looking for the more accurate version.
Phillips has built a style so unmistakably his own that by now the adjective "Phillipsian" would mean something specific to any serious reader of contemporary poetry — that long, qualifying, self-interrogating syntax in service of hard-won lyric truth.
In Scattered Snows, to the North, this syntax is used to explore questions of will and acquiescence, of what it means to accept limitation, of the relationship between desire and what desire does to the person who has it. These are not new subjects for Phillips, but the poems here feel more resigned than earlier work — resignation in the Buddhist rather than the defeated sense: a clearer-eyed acceptance of what is, rather than a giving up.
Nature and the will
The natural world in these poems functions, as in much of Phillips's work, as a site of instruction and analogy. Snow scatters to the north; animals move through landscapes without apparent intention; weather happens to the receptive body. These are not poems in which the poet transcends nature, or finds comfort in it, or imposes meaning on it — they are poems in which the poet watches nature carefully and lets it disclose something about how the mind works, how desire works, how the will operates when it operates at all.
The winter landscape of the title is particularly present — cold, spare, stripped back. It suits the book's temperament, which is reflective and a little elegiac without being mournful.
A fifteenth collection
There is a question that attends any poet's fifteenth collection: has the work deepened, or merely continued? In Phillips's case the answer is unambiguously the former, but with a caveat. Readers new to Phillips will find the collection demanding — it rewards familiarity with the larger project, and some of what feels like depth to long-term readers may feel like density to new ones. This is not a criticism exactly, but it is honest. Scattered Snows, to the North is best read after at least a few of the earlier collections.
Final verdict
Carl Phillips is one of the most important American poets now writing, and this collection confirms the assessment. It does not have the immediate accessibility of some recent poetry — it asks something of its readers — but what it offers in return is commensurate with the demand. These are poems that reward rereading and accumulate meaning over time. They are also, in their quiet way, among the most formally beautiful poems being written anywhere. Phillips remains essential.
