Silver: Poems

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Overview

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title.

This beautiful, slender collection—small and weighted like a coin—is Rowan Ricardo Phillips at his very best. These luminous, unsparing, dreamlike poems are as lyrical as they are virtuosic. “Not the meaning,” Phillips writes, “but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life” powers these poems as they conjure their prismatic array of characters, textures, and moods. As it reverberates through several styles (blank verse, elegy, terza rima, rhyme royal, translation, rap), Silver reimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end, Silver is a collection that reflects Phillips’s guiding principle—“part physics, part faith, part void”—that all is reflected in poetry and poetry is reflected in all.

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374615987
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	03/25/2025
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.38(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award, Phillips has been a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Poetry, and an NAACP Image Award, and has been long-listed for the National Book Award for Poetry. He is Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America, is forthcoming from FSG. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

Editorial Reviews

"To meet an increasingly isolating and terrifying era, Phillips retrenches in poetry, which, he claims, can be found everywhere. "The imagination hides in plain sight." Poetry stands by us, ready, Phillips seems to say, to console us with the truth, whether or not we want to hear it." —Craig Morgan Teicher, NPR

"A collection to ponder in wonder." —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist

"Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is 'a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges' . . . Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering." —Publishers Weekly

From the Publisher

12/18/2023

Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips (Living Weapon) offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is “a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges”; “part physics, part faith, part void”; “the breath your breath takes before you breathe”; “séance and silence and science.” Poems in blank verse deliver metaphysical considerations as Phillips asks, “What forms/ First: a thing or its form? The I or me?/ The maker or the thinker?” and responds, “But now when I think of that lost thought,/ Somehow found here in the sudden and faint/ Power of sacred songs, perplexity/ Sidles in with the setting sun again.” Wordsworth’s autobiographical work explicitly inspires the volume’s long, final poem, “Child of Nature,” while in diction and sensibility, Wallace Stevens is another prominent genius loci, as the speaker roams “the shore and chatoyance of the sea stones,” or distinguishes between “the torque/ Of the bay and not the bay itself.” Elsewhere are moments of delicate, singsong probing: “Hadn’t it all/ Been something else/ Before? Something// Else somewhere/ Else to someone/ Else before?” and self-mythologizing verses: “Chanting through three moods so as not to forget:/ The ground, then heaven, then the weapon.” Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly