Phillips, Robert (Schaeffer) - Alan Williamson
ALAN WILLIAMSON
Robert Phillips's poetry has the surface virtues of clarity, verbal gamesmanship, descriptive grace. But the substance of the theme-and-variations poems that make up most of The Pregnant Man too often reminds me of the exercises given out in slightly trendy or "experimental" writing workshops. Take a myth, give it a more cynical—or more psychoanalytic—moral than it usually has, then write it up in slang, mentioning diaphragms, Forest Hills, and Truman Capote. Take a dead metaphor involving a part of the body … and literalize it…. Phillips's relentless reliance on cliché in these poems will doubtless strike some readers as purposeful, a rueful commentary on the inescapable banality of our true feelings. For me, it mainly adds an unpleasing brittleness of tone to what remains—even when touched with lyric grace, as in "The Head"—a poetry written to formula, with an almost indecently built-in claim to extreme levels of psychic pain....
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