A Review of Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024) - By Vikki C.

Scattered Snows, To The North (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2024) by Carl Phillips is a stunning meditation on memory and liminal landscapes experienced through a dream-like consciousness. Vulnerable, nuanced and hypnotic, Phillips uncovers the imprints of personal and collective desire where each poem protracts time beyond the quotidian to an otherness that queries the boundaries between truth, dreams and perception. 

Through breathtaking syntax and authenticity the speaker channels the beauty and violence of a natural wilderness which itself embodies a spectrum of human qualities. The relationship dynamic is examined, for example, through a river’s movement and behavior (‘Sunlight In Fog’). “Maybe what a river loves most/about the banks that hold it—that appears to hold it– / is their willingness or resignation to being / more context for the river’s progress/or retreat depending.” From tenderness to remorse, we inhabit that complex affinity and refusal between self and nature: “Sometimes a wind demolished the trees / that were planted, years ago, for stopping the wind, one had come to rely on them as upon memory…” (‘Searchlights’). 

The darker layers of the psyche are furthered by motifs of ancient battle such as in ‘The Vikings’, ‘Artillery’ and ‘Gladiators’, which explore conflict (of self and other) as a stark counterpoint in the journey towards revelation. Tender, philosophical and cinematic in its rendering of love, this collection enriches and stirs a primordial sense of ancestral symbiosis. To slow and reflect through an interior and natural lens on each season of loss and becoming. An exquisite, luminous and prescient work, which I rate as one of my favourites of those read this year.  

Scattered Snows, to the North is published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux and is available on Amazon.