The Clearing

Revolving around the deaths of the poet s parents and first wife, The Clearing is a sustained meditation on the nature of love and its transformations. Perpetually dissatisfied with memory and what one poem calls the falsehoods about death we tell ourselves, White s poems turn on emotional openness and probing inquiry. How moving it is to find a book so haunted by tragedy and death that is, in addition, soberly life-affirming. A clearing is an empty space, but it is also a habit of mind, an act of clarification. Philip White knows pain s truths, the most awful of which is that the dead don t come back. After such knowledge, he then recognizes that mind-changing sorrow dribbles away. His poems record irreplaceable loss, and they also represent one man s resilience and his ability to feel and love again. The Clearing is a very promising debut. Willard Spiegelman Philip White s remarkable sequence conveys with great force the emptying of self and world through the loss of a sustaining love, and the grim, gradual outliving of that state. Though anything but metronomic, his poems have a versatile formal strength, and can, for instance, make use at moments of the sonnet s structure. Even when confronting a world void of meaning, White has an admirable descriptive power, and nothing could be more vivid than these graveside lines from East Lawn: First the flowers were thrown, then the earth. I remember the rich incrementaldark by shovelful smothering their flaming colorslike a cloudbank slowly blotting out stars. Richard Wilbur"