HEARING EYE Publications

Jewish Chronicle, February 17 2003

Looking for You
Peter Phillips
Hearing Eye £6.95

Peter Phillips tackles family suffering through understatement and wry humour. "Looking for You" is organised into eight sequences: "Looking for You," "Looking At Us," "Closeness," "Reflections," "Night Tales," "London Poems," "Fox Tales" and "Poems Have No Stamina." In the first, Phillips tenderly contemplates his mother's Alzheimers's disease:

"Tired from a sit-down shower,
she sits in her chair.
Mother's good at sitting"

("Silent Tongue")

"Closeness" also focuses on familial pain; in this case, the death of Phillip's first wife:

"A candle on the kitchen window sill
commemorates your death.
It burns all night in a small glass,
silhouettes the room as once you did."

Unlike Gershon, Phillips is "too young to feel the blackshirt shadow" ("Brick Lane, E1"). But he is at home in London. "Primrose Hill is grandmother" ("Primrose Hill"), is one of several descriptions of the capital's districts as "London Cousins." Away from the familiarity of North London, he indentifies himself as "a visitor from the Northern Line... a tourist" ("King's Road, Chelsea").

Rather like Gershon, Phillips does not feel at home among "white wine Sloanes." Such alienated sensations remind him that he inhabits the Anglo-Jewish diaspora, and he imagines checking his "passport is stamped."

In the sequence "Poems Have No Stamina," Phillips ventures outside England once again to become the tourist he has painted himself as on the King's Road. "Chutzpah" and "The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague" convey his understanding of Jewishness as something standing outside English culture.

"Chutzpah" is set in New York, where "neon flashes chutzpah" and "fresh means a pastrami on rye." "The Old Jewish Cemetery, Prague" conveys the longevity of the Jewish presence in Europe, its epitaph noting that the cemetery closed in 1787. (In Chelsea, the situation is different, those "white wine Sloanes" silencing such confident assertions of Jewishness.)

As an Anglo-Jew behaving like a stereotypical middle-class Englishman, Phillips represses his implicitly foreign Jewishness. Consequently, he

"feels
like a starched tablecloth
ironed out flat, the odd stain
hidden"

("Theatre Land")

Peter Lawson

 

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