Scattered Snows, to the North - Carl Phillips
I still don't really know how to write about poetry. If I'm being completely frank, I'm still learning how to read it properly (because reading poetry is just as much of a skill as reading anything else is, and it's a skill I haven't practiced much).
I enjoyed this, though I didn't love it. And that's a shame, because the very first poem in the book - Regime - really landed for me, and after that I was excited for the rest of the work in this volume. Unfortunately nothing else ever really attained that height, though Gladiators came close.
It's interesting that both here and in Jack Spicer's After Lorca I was most drawn to the first poem in the collection (and doubly interesting that they're both tercet sonnets, too). Maybe there's something about that first exposure to someone's voice that really works for me? Or maybe it's that when sequencing a collection poets know to start strong, and I respond to that. Or maybe I just really love sonnets, and this is a massive coincidence. We'll see.
I may not have loved this but I enjoyed it enough that I'm still enthusiastic about exploring more poetry over the next year. Let's see how I get on with the rest of the collections on the National Book Critics Circle longlist.