Earlier this year I woke in the middle of the night unable to breathe. I lay in the dark, alert, aware of every single intake of air and its expulsion. I was alone. I was in a remote place. There was no one to take me to hospital or order a car or ambulance, and nothing I could do except lie very still and quiet until the episode passed and I could feel my body returning to its nomal resting state.

It occurs to me now, as I start to write this piece about the poetry of Carl Phillips, that those feelings I had in that faraway house, in that deep midnight of a room, reflect exactly the state I am in when reading the work of this powerfully affective writer. There’s something heavy resting on my chest; my heart rate increases. ‘The wind stirred – the water beneath it stirred accordingly’ Phillips writes in ‘Speak Low’. For long seconds I am conscious of my body and the poem that is before me in the most scary, acute, unsettled kind of way.

None of this is to say his work carries dread, of some dire warning, portent of illness or incapacity, or of an existential kind. On the contrary, these are poems filled with life, with love and sense and physicality and knowledge of pleasure. Oh, yes. Pleasure. Masses of good, bodily, emotionally charged physical pleasure. So – gardens. Trees. Men. Fruit. Animals. The light itself. The temperature… All are felt as sensation, experience, lust in the way Robert Herrick framed his lust for life ...