At Literary Hub, Rebecca Morgan Frank and I wrote an overview of forthcoming books, including reviews and previews. I wrote about Anne Carson’s Wrong Norma, Cindy Juyoung Ok’s Ward Toward, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s Silver, Diane Seuss’s Modern Poetry, Reginald Shepherd’s The Selected Shepherd, Danez Smith’s Bluff, and Arthur Sze’s translation of Chinese poetry, The Silk Dragon II. The piece can be found here.
Here is my interpretation of Phillips’s Silver:
“Poetry is séance and silence and science,” Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes in Silver, his fourth collection. The seance summons a presiding spirit of this collection, the Wallace Stevens of the late-Romantic meditative eloquence (the lights at Key West that “mastered the night and portioned out the sea”). The silence is that of a place in the woods away from the pandemic where the speaker goes to cull “from those cold mountaintops the next fire.” The silence is that of a grandmother dying on the cusp of the pandemic. The science is the prosody of air and metal that lifts a silver plane with its silver contrail above the woods and the silver of the rental car to which the speaker rushes to avoid an expired parking meter, also silver, as the grandmother expires. “And I will be nothing but poetry,” the speaker says in his mournful solitude, “A blank in the blankness of the long game.”
The poems are more forthright than Stevens, more directly autobiographical and socially equitable, but the dedication with which Phillips approaches the art of poetry is, like Stevens, tonic and inspiring. “To be bottomless, atemporal, absent of hierarchy, and just,” he enjoins in “Biographia Literaria. “To accept that poetry is older than reflex, that it predates intention, that it is the breath your breath takes before you breathe.”
