Silver: Poems [Paperback]

Rowan Ricardo Phillipss fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title.

This beautiful, slender collectionsmall and weighted like a coinis 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),Silverreimagines them with such extraordinary vision and alluring strangeness that they sound irrepressibly fresh and vibrant. From beginning to end,Silveris a collection that reflects Phillipss guiding principlepart physics, part faith, part voidthat 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.

Rowan Ricardo Phillipsis 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 Nicol?s Guill?n 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 ofThe New Republic. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.

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