"Nude Figure" pictures a girlfriend naked, though the syntax is slightly confusing, the speaker's mind apparently both the "last panther in the hills" and a "blue sleeveless blouse with a gold zipper." The girl might have been wearing the blouse; but the syntax says otherwise, and syntax is the poet's devil. Any subtlety goes for naught, because soon the speaker says:

All I once knew of the world now fills

With lies and fear and terror, flies past us

And dies as you lie back, the last sentence

Ever spoken in the lost tongue of the poets

That went This was our planet, a past tense,

Some dot gerrymandered into fire.

This eco-apocalypse couldn't persuade even a saint to stop using plastic straws. You can't simply throw around hulking abstractions like "lies" and "fear" and "terror," expecting the reader to mistake speechifying for wisdom. Aristotle seemed to understand that.

Neither do snippets from the headlines ("A man hauls crate after crate of rifles / Into a hotel. A child is shot dead / On the spot as he plays with a toy gun") give the poet license to sneer:

Some small-town lawyer calls

The melting world a myth and yet believes

In prayer, that God hears and cares for him

And somehow, amid thirteen billion years

Of stars to care for, has time ….

The poet may be right, but he's not offering argument — or, hell, poetry.

Poets often seem to move through the mists, certain where they're going, sure the reader will dawdle behind. Alas, in Phillips's new work I feel like Hansel and Gretel after losing their bread crumbs. "Living Weapon" begins and ends in prose, and the poems between come like a forced march in a manner infected by Wallace Stevens at his blowziest.

The book opens with a winged angel, a latter-day Icarus landing atop Freedom Tower, now One World Trade Center, which replaced the topless towers of New York. One could read a few uncomfortable meanings into this visitation, but Phillips prefers a scatty origin story that hangs in midair. Worse, buttered up with sentimental touches, the tale is cast in prose that would embarrass the freshmen in a composition course:

Early on the hottest day of the year, in the black but thinning darkness of morning, I saw the top of the new skyscraper peek through the gauze of lingering night's sleepy electric glaze.

This lazy homage — or surrender — to hard-boiled crime fiction remains out of character, given the elegant, or at least canny, descriptions of which Phillips is capable.

Spenser said his epic was "clowdily enwrapped in Allegoricall devises," but it's never clear here whether the winged dude is a savior or just a messed-up kid with superpowers. Is this pseudo-Icarus the living weapon? He was born with wings, and as a child tried to cut them off. Wait! Isn't that the back story of Angel, one of the original X-Men? The book tries hard to be both the debut issue of a new Marvel comic (blockbuster movie to follow) and a sermon on violence, guns, hatred, what have you. It's tough to be one, much less both. You can, however, rip your titles from Galileo, T. S. Eliot, Dickens, Donne, Cocteau and DC Comics.