There is an innate vibrancy to childhoods spent in small Southern towns, where landscape becomes the gateway to all memory and sensual experience. Whether idealized or examined with the most meticulous realism, each young person shares a certain set of common denominators – the feel of clay squished between fingers, the bite of hot gravel on bare summer toes, and above all the rich mystery of place and its confounding relationship with the meaning of home. In Patrick Phillips’ collection, Chattahoochee, this mystery lives in the primeval syllables of old language – the Bible verses he quotes from, and the very Indian name for the river the in rural Georgia, Chattahoochee. Rivers like the Chattahoochee, places with names that reference all that is gone from the land, preoccupy and concern the collection – water as birth, as the dangerous flood, as absolution, as the marker of home. Imagery steeped both in sensuality and history, whether personal, local or biblical, is the currency Patrick Phillips trades in in the poems of Chattahoochee. He deploys each poem as a snapshot – a photographic moment ripped from a film shot in clear-eyed cinema verite.

The trappings of the sensuality contrast deliciously with the language, tone and implication of the poems, which rise up, clear-eyed and in some moments too desperately laconic, to tell the story of a boy, his family, their old house, and a river to which the poet returns again and again in his mind. In “The Flood,” water is both torturer – “In the dream of the flood I’m always the one / looking back, turning into a pillar of water” – and narcissistic lover – “I drag a stick through my reflection, whose name is written in water.” The river and its water form the common thread in this collection of obscured memories. The poet recreates an album of these memories, from family lineage to the making of a deeply conflicted man whose pain is visited on his family in “Twelve Views of My Father.” In “The Mussel,” he recreates the archetypal resentment of younger siblings – “I hated my brother more each time/he threw his body off the pier,/…I was six,/too small to swim in the heavy current…” – and yet also uses a cut his brother gets from a mussel shell to foreshadow the damage to come for his brother at the hands of the river in “My Brother, On Lake Lanier.”

The men – brother, father, uncle and grandfather of the poet – all appear in the collection, and seem to elucidate the myriad aspects of a boy’s childhood in a Southern society. The poet portrays them hunting, snapping the spine of a rabbit, fishing, narrating racist screed, yet struggling to provide for their families and above all, defined by a deep, nameless sadness and abiding love almost universally translated into cruelty, punctuated by brief moments of connection. Fittingly, Phillips bestows a poem where such a moment lives – a boy’s realization of the beauty in his father’s fallibility – with the title “Ars Poetica: Hitting the Curve:” “It helps to know Plato’s is from becomes—/that the field was a field, the bat a creaking ash limb.//To know that even your withered, pale father was beautiful/once, the bat falling from his shoulders like silk…”

One is left wondering, where are the women? The mother is present, of course, but as more of an icon or conduit of birth. The poems do not capture her in the same psychological depth as the father. She seems at first glance more of a stock character, the mother from all southern stories of pain, gothic, and rivers—long-suffering, the Judas of her sons. But this first glance is deceptive; as one reads further into Chattahoochee, one begins to discover that the river itself is a stand-in, and in places a scapegoat, for the deeply felt, for the tangibly realized relationship, and at its core, for the intensity nostalgic ache therein.

The book as a collection suffers from the very suffering it portrays – the poems seem to compete with each other for the role of memento mori, and the more rococo titles like “In the Museum of Your Last Day” clash with dissonance against overly-invested one-word titles like “Baptism.” However strained, at its best Chattahoochee retains a continuity of breath and language. One imagines in retrospect that the poet is trying to use poetic articulation to prevent his own metaphorical drowning. In the title poem, which serves as both hinge and catalyst in a stand-alone section between parts I and III of the book, the poet reaches clarity on his project: “If the drowned man must speak, then—/If his body, stripped bare, floats away—let him say this:/the oldest instinct is to find what you bury,/to come back and dig up your bones.”