Breakdown Lane (Johns Hopkins: Poetry and Fiction) - Hardcover

Phillips, Professor Robert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0801848547 ISBN 13: 9780801848544

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994

Synopsis

Over the past two decades Robert Phillips has built a reputation as one of the outstanding American poets of his generation. Now, in his fifth full collection of verse, that reputation is both confirmed and consolidated. These are thoughtful, substantive poems that may make the reader smile - and reflect. There are autobiographical poems about the poet's childhood, elegies for the recent dead in American arts, extended metaphors on suburban existence, and a long section of poems in which the poet courts, wins, then loses the Muse. Both in voice and performance, Breakdown Lane is a thoroughly consistent and engaging volume.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Phillips is director of the Creative Writing Program and professor of English at the University of Houston.

Reviews

Phillips's ( Personal Accounts ) fifth collection of verse is about loss and lost directions in a life of diminished expectations. In the title poem, he writes of being passed on a highway by a brother, father, wife, rival; when his confident younger self drove by, it ``really hurt.'' The poem concludes: ``I'll just stagger / toward the horizon, not / knowing what's ahead . . . / or why I am crying.'' A sequence of poems called ``An Affair with the Muse'' documents love found and lost, but here Phillips's passion lacks energy. His loss seems less important than it might be. ``Happiness,'' perhaps the most successful of the love poems, gives us ``sunrise in Eden,'' while the next poem in the sequence laments, ``You could have answered just one of my letters.'' The last of the book's four sections, ``American Elegies,'' offers poetry written for Charles Ives, the art critic John I.H. Baur, and the poets Howard Moss and Muriel Rukeyser, as well as other poems, among them one about stray socks in the laundry: ``Learn to count on nothing.'' In the elegy for Rukeyser, Phillips writes: ``Her poems still burn.'' Clearly, the lives of those concerned with art rouse his enthusiasm. But as a whole, this book fails to generate much heat.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801848547
• ISBN 13: 9780801848544
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 88