Under a Paper Trellis
(2006, Factory Hollow Press)
by Alex Phillips
reviewed by Jennifer Tolo Pierce
From the first line of Alex Phillips’ opening poem, “The Sadist’s Tooth” — in
which he tells a radio, “You seem to move / easily through your various
voices” — it is clear that Phillips’ chapbook, Under a Paper Trellis, has a story
to tell, or rather, multiple stories that energetically weave themselves together
into a hum of motion and nervous footing. The eleven poems included in this
collection published by Factory Hollow Press vibrate with the discomforting
juxtaposition of certitude and doubt, visible in the layering of statements and
observations with the numerous questions of one who is not convinced of the
truth of his own words. This juxtaposition at times makes the poems rough,
but also undeniably human, and the rapid transitions between imagery and
time echo the frenetic voices of the radio station. A ball falls into a mouth, the
narrator moves to kiss the mouth, the mouth disappears. Seasons pass, the
narrator finds himself suddenly in mysterious places. Phillips balances
specificities against abstraction in a manner that pulls the reader into a world
in which boundaries soften and distinctions between realities fall into
question. The radio dial continues to scan, but instead of chaotic hiss and
confusion the reader is left instead with an imprint of each poem, a ghost
image verging on familiarity. There is a level of disconnect between the
narrator and his subject matter that makes the poems even more otherworldly
and hints at a detachment that lends itself to questions such as “What does
your voice / really sound like out there in the hall?” as well as the cold
brutality of images such as “A glassy stare came from the rocket with the slit
throat.” Yet even in their disconnectedness these impressions are still part of
the same story, still belonging to each other however tenuous the attachments.
Phillips confesses in his author bio that the poems in Under a Paper Trellis
“grow out of [his] quiet uneasiness,” and to be sure, an uneasiness courses
through the entire collection that speaks of an unsettled urgency and
momentum. In “Faculty Plaza,” the narrator states “What drives me and you
from this bench / is the botanical looseness of expectation” and the reader
immediately recognizes that despite the loose quality of those expectations,
expectations are nonetheless high. And so they are for Phillips in putting
words to paper. Determined in their declarations, vulnerable in their doubt,
the poems create a world in which illusions can stand as reality and realities
can shift seamlessly from one into another. As he writes in “Faculty Plaza” —
“In this way, yes I agree to meet with you this evening. / I promise to take
notes, / and I promise to do it the hard way.”
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