Customer Reviews

Whispers in a Secret Garden : Poetry and Haiku

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Mr. Phillips blends romance with nature leaving the reader with astonishing mental images, both vivid and wondrous. From the emotional beauty of "Clowns", the raw power of "The Face of Death", the intensity of cyber life in "The Stoning (of Gwarfax)", to his amazing mastery of haiku, Mr. Phillips has authored a vibrant tapestry of the written word.

I believe Mr. Phillips' work will continue to evolve and blend even more aspects of everyday life into wrought emotion.

Building friendships over the Internet is fraught with uncertainty. The medium lends itself to excess and deception, and its power is based in the power of words. "Whispers in a Secret Garden," shows us how powerful words can be. Phillips not only sketches outlines of the Internet experience in such poems as "The Stoning of Gwarfax," "Short Circuit" and "The Child Warrior," but also shares his love of the natural world in his poems "Wildflower," "Longing," and in his haiku. His photographs add a nice counterpoint to the island's natural beauty described in his haiku. "Whispers in a Secret Garden" is an exciting beginning, and I'm looking forward to his next published work.

Whispers In A Secret Garden is an admirable composite of work that contrasts the stark pain of truth about personal relationships with the soothing forces of one's relationship with nature. Although the pieces speak separately in most cases, there are a few where Phillips has blended both together, making the difference even more acute and poignant.

The overall tone to most of the poems is haunting and disturbing. Turbulence abounds under a calm facade of quiet realizations about the self, particularly through the examination of others. There is quiet acceptance in acknowledgment of the way things are, from a lover to the immutable dynamics of nature.

Most of the poems in the book have more than just the surface level of meaning. "Entertainer," "The Child Warrior," "Homepage," are but three examples of this. Even as some of the dual pieces address the strange and alien world of cyber courtship, they can all be taken on an even grander level when the computer is removed. Phillips is particularly adept at the use of metaphors - even as the poem is true on its immediate apparent level - whether it be the computer, some aspect of nature, or a completely different image that strikes a parallel chord.

He also does well in both longer and short verse. Short Circuit, The Wall, and A Room Called Love are three examples that trace the path beginning to end, and leave the reader as heart broken as the poet. One of his powerful short works is On Approval: "They say we are born to try each other/Well we did/and you in your American way/traded me in for a newer model" And in Persuasion, he acknowledges responsibility for the type of male thinking that women can often think is of them, because the woman has unknowingly been hooked into a fallacy: "Like a physician's leech,/I must suck away the spirit in you/which I love,/bury it in some hidden place/where no one can share it,/then despise you/for your emptiness. "

Like listening to the folk songs of John Gorka, repeated readings of Whispers In A Secret Garden will leave the reader feeling rather maudlin but infinitely richer for having been down the path of an artist that is adept at communicating his emotions in a manner that the recipient, on a visceral level, knows well.