From the Devotions.

• Author: Rankovic, Catherine
• Position: Brief Article

The gifted poet Carl Phillips debuted in 1992 with a book titled In the blood. He introduced himself in the first few pages as a gay black man, but some of his poems rebelled against any attempt to label him:

I want to tell the poet that the blues

is not my name, that Alabama

is something I cannot use

in my business.

from Passing"

Phillips's second book, Cortege (1995), was less self-confident. Its subject wa!; fleshly desire, and the poems were uneven in force and quality. He was explicit about his tentativeness:

There are certain words -- ecstasy.

abandon,

surrender--we can wait all our lives.

sometimes.

not so much to use,

as to use correctly

from "Youth With Satyr, Both Resting"

Phillips is still exploring those words. The title of his new, third book, From the Devotions, refers to John Donne's Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, an eccentric, psychical prose interrogation of the divine purpose behind illness and mortality.

From the Devotions addresses how people of all kinds seem compelled to invent, exalt, and serve "gods various," from Jesus to artistic perfection to sex. (Money is noticeably absent from Phillips's sampler of passions.)

One of Phillips's strengths is his background in the study of Latin and Greek. His poems take myths and make them vital and silvery again. For the past fifteen years or so, more and more thoroughly secular poets have used religious references to lend energy and scale to their work, just as they used the language of psychoanalysis before that. In From the Devotions, Phillips is expressing, better than most, an emerging generational concern about things spiritual.

But From the Devotions is not a book of sermons, Christian or otherwise. There is earthly celebration here:

Imagining the flesh before

or without knowledge, I want to say it is

most like song untrained, whose beauty,

when it occurs, surprises even

itself -- but isn't it also, more commonly, just

meat, or isn't it good soil...