'Reconnaissance' Reckons with Power and Love

In his latest collection of poetry, “Reconnaissance,” Carl Phillips bravely reckons with the ways power is experienced and enacted in intimate relationships. How, he seems to ask, can power be exercised in a moral fashion? Some of the poems question the idea that such a paradox can be solved at all. The illustrative poem “Steeple” opens with such uncertainty: “Maybe love really does mean the submission of power— / I don’t know.” Others explore the intricate and myriad ways power relations play out in close relationships. Elaborating on these relations with a carefully balanced tone, the collection overall is evocative, nuanced, and strikingly beautiful.

Phillips, obviously comfortable with ambiguity and shades of meaning, is also an exacting and careful writer. His poems often feature subtle distinctions in verbal meaning. It is unsurprising that, having graduated from Harvard in 1981 with an A.B. in Greek and Latin, he writes in a style that evokes classical poetry. In his use of carefully unspooling clauses, epithets, and allusions to classical mythology, he resembles other current poets, such as Louise Glück and Anne Carson, who find contemporary resonances in classical forms and references. Additionally, while he addresses issues of recent popular fascination, his work draws strength and wisdom from his deep awareness of history.

Phillips is distinctly attuned to the power people have over each other. As he puts it in “Steeple,” there are so many “ways we do harm, /or refrain from it, when nothing says we have to.” This line characteristically focuses on the intersection of desire with love and mercy: the pull between doing harm and refraining, the “we,” and the multiplicity suggested by “ways” all contribute to a feeling of morally ambivalent intimacy. On the other hand, true love might ultimately be a respite from power, a release from restraint. “Chromatic Black” ends with a wish to be cradled without “shame”: “Here’s a lullaby: /‘No more bondage, no triumph either no more the bluing waves /of shame…’” Similarly, in “From A Land Called Near-Is-Far,” Phillips writes: “For once, let’s /be still. Together. It could be hunger, it could be sex, /that smell, or fearfulness, or just fear by itself—tenderer /hands than ours, soundlessly, as they at last unyoke us.” Sex is seen as a unifying, equalizing, non-hierarchical force here, and at the end of “Last Night,” it is presented even more subtly and delicately: “There’s /a trembling inside the both of us, /there’s a trembling, inside us both.”

Elsewhere in the collection, Phillips explores the pleasures of power with a greater degree of intensity. For instance, in his poem “The Darker Powers,” he writes—“sometimes—out of pity, /not mercy, for /nothing tender /about it—I show the darker /powers I’ve hardly shown /to anyone.” These powers are near and dear to the speaker—Phillips ends the poem with the speaker “putting them back, /just behind my heart, where they blacken /and thrive.” This poem, a seductive dramatic monologue from the perspective of a dominant speaker, shows Phillips at the height of his poetic powers—fully in control, in every sense. Each line is carefully measured, each clause painstakingly weighted. Phillips’s masterful construction gives this poem an intense sonic beauty and power.

Phillips’s appreciation of the pleasure of power is tempered by his awareness of its danger. While some of his poems seem to take a more extreme stance, others add complexity and nuance to his vision. For instance, in “After Learning That The Spell Is Irreversible” the speaker muses, “Did you know there /are animals that will spend their entire /lives in silence, if they don’t get killed /by something more violent, more alive/ somehow?” He refers to these animals’ final noises in terms that suggest artistic expression: “whatever scrap of sound they’d always / held inside them… a kind of / song to at least go down singing.” This poem insists that violent power hierarchies are necessary for the creation of art. But in the very next one Phillips revises that hard stance. He opens “From A Land Called Near-Is-Far” with the question: “But what if all suffering is in fact for nothing— /no particular wisdom after, blooming flower-like, /blood in the water?” which suggests a stepping away from any celebration or justification of the violence power gives rise to.

All the poems indeed abound with war imagery—even the title of the collection refers to a military activity. Phillips returns several times to the battlefield, that ultimate site in which power plays itself out with no room for compromises, just winners and losers. He seems to end with the refusal of intimacy—the final line of the final poem concludes: “Don’t touch me—.” And yet, by ending the poem, and the collection, with this line that breaks off without clear conclusion, Phillips still leaves open the possibility of negotiating power and intimacy in a way that is moral.