Silver - by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

About the Book

"Rowan Ricardo Phillips's fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"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

"Phillips refines and reworks his own poetics against the backdrop of tradition. . . This tension between what "has never been done before" and the knowledge that "every poem has already been written" is central to Phillips; tradition is what he coaxes music from. He uses echo, reprisal, repetition and recurrence as strategies for invention." --Lorna Knowles Blake, The Hudson Review

About the Author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of many books of poetry, prose, and translation. The recipient of a Whiting 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 International 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 a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University and the poetry editor of The New Republic. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.