Temporary solutions

Silver, Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s fourth collection of poems, is a book full of thought with the sound turned up. Its musical patterning, its syncopations and assonances, is pronounced and central to its movement and arguments: “I can’t see what doesn’t sing”, he writes in “The Triumph of Song”. A counterbalancing idea of silence – eternal and ongoing – is just as much a shaping force. A riff on Seamus Heaney’s “The Given Note” is resituated in Luanda, “An island turned into pain”; here, “an iron note” is a “Song of a somewhere turned into nowhere”. A number of similar transfigurations occur. The footballer Lionel Messi turns inaction into glory in the obsessive, incantatory “La Pulga”, where the former Barcelona prodigy is “invisible to them like a god / And powerful to them like a god”.

Phillips’s universe inclines towards “the singular essential thing”: the poems appear to be in search of “one brief glimpse of God in this world”. Yet any answers he offers are never simple or definitive – these poems are as much about the struggle with meaning-making and declaration as anything else, leading to “A different kind of murder you call art”. Poetry here is a ritual, a habit and a compulsion, “part physics, part faith, part void”; Phillips’s voice is at its most suggestive and original when it carries this mixture of hope and self-deception.

He is immersed in the history of his art, even when that history is uncomfortable. He often gestures towards the American poetic tradition and its attempts to uncouple from imperial inheritances: to argue “That it simply sprung up // From some uninhabited / Space: this epic of epics, / This American song”, while smuggling in work it has spent centuries reacting against. “Child of Nature” takes Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and ambitiously remixes it, matching the end-words of its lines note for note to fashion an existential wrangle on belonging, form and “the fiction of poems”: “My Old Testament: a corner store’s joy / At being part of the life of things”.

Silver’s title is not lightly chosen. The word – its hue and suggestive, sibilant value – appears throughout the book in vapour trails, sleek rental cars, “silver morning’s silver haze”. It is evoked most powerfully in the second of two poems, together the book’s emotional centrepiece and finest achievement, that elegize Phillips’s grandmother. The first, “Prelude”, announces that it, “like all [elegies], is so useless and late”. “Postlude”, meanwhile, enacts a sober, self-scolding cataloguing of final things – “just for a second, I’d deemed / those things to be of value in themselves” – before becoming a commentary on the previous elegy. Here it holds itself to account, too, while blending symbolic patterning with characteristic lyricism: “far / away was a better me who would chant, // she saw it coming so she left, but my car / was waiting downstairs, silver and fine-free”.

This instinct towards self-correction is a further feature of the book, and of Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s scrupulous art as a whole. “The self, the one you bought the ticket for, / That temporary solution for X” is something that, like song, has to be fashioned from the void, as a rejoinder to a beguiling nullity. His greatest trick, perhaps, is to put on a show for the reader as he wrestles with complicated thinking – until somehow, as in his study of Messi, “You’re standing in negative space now”.

Declan Ryan’s debut collection of poems, Crisis Actor, was published in 2023

Browse the books from this week’s edition of the TLS here

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