Phillips, Robert (Schaeffer) - Jerome Mazzaro
JEROME MAZZARO
Most readers will be delighted by the surface wit of The Pregnant Man. Robert Phillips is a very entertaining poet and a master of the double-take. Not only are words given double duty in terms of puns, but line breaks do double duty, images and statements recur, and poems have two movements or become new looks at subjects treated first by painters or other writers. Even the epiphanies of this attempt at "male consciousness raising/razing" force new looks. One immediate reaction is laughter in that perceptions that are momentarily disappointing still prove pleasurable…. A second result is a search for resolution and transcendence in the wisdom that comes of dual perspective. Divided into three stages, the search moves from the individual ("Body Icons") to intersubjectivity ("In Clown Clothes") to community ("The Sacred and the Suburban"), and more often than the speaker of "Foot Notes," readers discover that they, too, have "one foot/in the...
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