I start with sorrow,Then feign joyIn the rhythm method.I do dark things lightly And light things darkly. Opening my front door,I find the world in flames,Our tree frozen into rictus,And the front door gone.But then I listenFor that color, that verb, That mineral, that metal, And after, the electricData of tattooed angels Dancing on air.Hadn’t it allBeen something else Before? SomethingElse somewhere Else to someoneElse before? CouldBe. Could be.But the trick, You see, is to say That this has neverBeen done before,That it simply sprung upFrom some uninhabited Space: this epic of epics,This American song.
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“Paradise Lost” from SILVER by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Copyright © 2024 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Used/Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux. All Rights Reserved.
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Sue Kwon
Sue Kwon
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of seven previous 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. His book in progress, I Just Want Them to Remember Me: Black Baseball in America will be published by FSG in 2025. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.
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.
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