“Have yourself a little Phil: A Review of My Blossoming Everything” by Philip Terman

by Bubba Henson

Have yourself a little Phil, is the phrase we coin here. It is a recommendation. Use it with the hardcore poet warrior, as well as the amateur lover of a good poem. 

At a time in which the status quo is on fire, bile is on tap in our stomachs, and poets are celebrating their identities, pushing native languages into new conjugations and tenses, and collapsing or expanding form into new structures (concrete poetry, like rust, never sleeps), one wonders about wonder itself, and whether it and exuberance, gratitude, and faith are fossil fuels for the contemporary poetry engine. 

But all it takes is a little Phil — Philip Terman, the Pennsylvanian poet — to be reminded of the rewards for poetry that is equally as comfortable in a garden or a synagogue, in memory and community, and in family and love. Terman's poetry has a lyrical and devotional aspect to it that is infectious and positive, offering a path to gratitude through these hard times. Terman did his doctoral thesis on the poetry of James Wright, so blossoming is a key modifier and verb in his recent volume, My Blossoming Everything (Saddle Road Press, 2024). This volume comes some nine years after Terman’s new and selected poems, Our Portion (Autumn House Press, 2015), which contains some of his most lyrical work.

Were poetic time travel possible, Terman’s 21st century poetry might be understood by the great 19th century devotional poet and prosodic innovator Gerard Manley Hopkins. Terman’s use of nature to orient poetic meditation and as a thread for finding faith, gratitude, and the divine shares DNA with Hopkins’ theory of inscape and instress. Whereas inscape was Hopkins’ term for the essential uniqueness of a thing, instress was his idea for the energy or force that sustains an object’s inscape and allows the perceiver to apprehend it. In Terman’s poetry, he celebrates the rhythms and wonder of nature as inscaped objects that are instressed gifts. In “Poetry as Perfect as a June Evening”, we read “….This evening – /daring me to say something worthy,/something that offers a small response/to this moment in all its grandeur,/but all I can manage are a few words of witness – woodpecker owning the apple tree, hydrangeas/absorbing the sharp light…” It is his love of nature and the garden that adds balance to his faith and gratitude. To read Terman is to know all the birds on the country plot where his old schoolhouse stands, what is in season and to be harvested in his garden, and the sounds of his distant neighbors turning their fields to mark the seasons.

His eye is keen, too, for human behavior. In My Blossoming Everything, you find childhood sweetheart Roberta Rose’s dark hair in a ponytail, a late-night conference with a camp counselor about death, and the intertwining of his young hand with his brother’s. His love for his family and partner swell in and out of the seasonality of the volume, as in the titular love sonnet for his partner, “My Blossoming Everything,” which connects robins’ eggs, the mystery of love, and the scope of faith with simplicity and depth: “…Who are you, my beloved? My sweetness/My swallowtail, my infinite youth?/My pine shadow in the tall grass?/My other self, unreachable, My untrappable hummingbird/My synagogue empty of all but God…”

As an ardent citizen of faith and peace, you also find contemporary issues in Terman’s poetry. The poetic origin of his relationship with Palestinian poet and Gaza resident Nasser Rabah is here in the form of "4000," a powerful enumerative litany that Terman co-translated with Saleh Razzouk. Terman has been working for some time now to bring light to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, having written for Extraordinary Rendition: American Writers on Palestine (Or Books, 2015). Terman writes beautifully about his faith (The Whole Michpocha: New and Selected Jewish Poems (BenYehuda Press, 2024)).

A western Pennsylvanian, Terman also writes about the effect of fracking in "The Frackin' Poem", but of course, like any Terman poem, those trademark tercets include mention of scarlet tanagers, thrushes, and warblers, and the native shrubs and wildflowers. Terman ends this poem with FAFO satire and wordplay: "...When we frack, we frack ourselves."

My Blossoming Everything presents a poet who brings beauty, depth, and grace to his understanding of the key life dynamics that move him. We would all do well to have a little Phil in our lives.