These Indicium Tales

Lance Phillips

Both sensuous and sensual, These Indicium Tales continues Lance Phillips’s meditations on the body. Here, the indicia—markings or symbols—are birds, insects, and flowers, but rather than standing for the body, they stand with it in an exploration that refuses to romanticize nature. In this phenomenology of eros, where Phillips writes “I can’t think of a way of continuing which is not sexually charged,” no word is wasted. Though lines stutter and jam together, though syntax is disrupted and interwoven with silence, the language itself remains delicious on the tongue, even when read silently, which is precisely the sort of conundrum these Tales love to raise and leave in ambiguity.

“Lance Phillips’s poetry takes us immediately into a carnal theater where the word and its thing stagger under the weight of their attraction for each other. Thus actions which are rational and understandable in real life, like having sex and then touching your ear, take on enthralling intensity. The drama of representation is also heightened because the visual frame is a series of quickly changing keyholes; every foreshortened view has immediacy. This is not conventional poetry, in which voluptuous intentions are pursued by means of poetic rhetoric. Lance Phillips’s poetry models consciousness itself. So description won’t do; it’s too removed and slow. Rather than reconstitute, the poet enacts: ‘Desire and perception meld: moist crease, sun / Wasp, it filled his mouth.’ We are first witnesses as now, and again now, worlds interact: ‘On lips here her body in birds of the air.’ To read this book is to experience a series of transformations; in effect, to learn to read all over again.” —Paul Hoover