The Island's Only Escape

When a writer dies too young readers are always left with the question What kind of writer would he have become if he had been granted a full career? Matthew Phillips wrote these astonishingly good poems in his mid-twenties when he was studying Mideast history and politics and when he was questioning the many tensions of that region. His poems however are intellectually far-ranging from academic settings to the Caves of Lascaux from San Francisco to Sparta but rooted in his personal and educational experiences in America. In many of his poems he creates a narrator who describes what he sees around him and then with a more detached eye explores ideas and the meaning of personal experience. Sometimes the experience is literal as in his Letter From San Francisco and at other times more figurative as in The Caves of Lascaux. Matthew Phillips poems frequently concern philosophic probings of the meaning of History. In Flight of the Peacemaker the narrator says: As an American he was told to take The telescope rather than the magnifying glass; Its Historys long view that matters here. Yes it is the long view that matters here.