Event: Might Couldby

Might Couldby anna lena phillips bellwaywiser books, 88 pages, $19 Might could” is a Southern expression meaning “maybe I could” or “I might be able to,” conveying tentative possibility in a way neither verb alone could. The title of Anna Lena Phillips Bell’s latest collection, winner of the twentieth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, tells the reader that this is a book of nuanced uncertainty and doubtful optimism. In the title poem, Phillips Bell introduces this uncertainty with unconventional syntax, creating an echo, a bouncing back and forth of thought that never quite lands on an answer. But this convoluted word order mirrors the difficult way we come to understand difficult things: “What flowers do so well / we struggle to.” We read the first line and expect to be told what flowers do. Instead, in the second line, “we” becomes the subject. Echo-like, we are returned to the first line to find out—struggling for what? Reproduction, we find out, expressed in flowing list-like consonance, alliteration, and alternating trochees and iambs: stamen, pistil, petal—white-ruffled, yellow, wilder—with style and stigma,anther, answernew to new to new. The “we” interrupts the flowers again with that same awkward syntax, turning back on itself, looking for its verb: “Mostly they do / require, as we do, aid.” The reader must look backward to understand that the speakers require help in conceiving a child. The lines straighten out again for the flowers’ efficient pollination process, using rhyme, sharp t’s, and mellifluous l’s: “they orchestrate / the shift, the yellow freight / of pollen to and fro.” Finally, the couple learns from the flowers. They have their own lines: “We gather / ourselves, again.” They move forward, though with an echo of weariness, of going back, in that “again.” In a poem about an uncertain outcome, “Might Could”…