Karen Maceira
Profound Simplicity: A Review of Elegy for a Broken Machine, by Patrick Phillips. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.
Patrick Phillips accomplishes the most difficult task for a writer of
any genre—revealing the profound through a lens of simplicity. Employing mostly free verse, spare poems, Phillips delivers unvarnished details of human vulnerability. Beginning with the title poem elegizing his father, to the poem “Mercy,” which begins the second section of the book and portrays the speaker as a father to his sons, to the final poem, “Will,” in which he contemplates his own death, Phillips manages to render narrative, figuration, and form in accessible and imaginative but never simplistic ways. In this, his third, book, the poet continues a focus on family relationships as his major subject. He divides the book of thirty-one poems into three parts. The first section deals almost exclusively with the death of his father and begins with the title poem, which, as well as any in the collection, displays the poet’s skills. The poem begins with a depiction of the father and son in the garage as the father attempts a repair: My father was trying to fix something and I sat there just watching, like I used to, whenever something went wrong. The speaker here is “just watching,” but the word “just” is hardly inconsequential given the observer role of this (or any) writer. The poet nudges the narrative into something more than simple past tense with the line “like I used to.” The speaker is now grown and looking back on similar times. 81