Silver by Rowan Ricardo Philipps

Silver

Rowan Ricardo Philipps

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

The six strings of Atahualpa Yupanqui’s guitar; the lyre of Apollo; certain mornings and their metallic haze; sharks, swords, rivers, rings: Rowan Ricardo Philipps’ new book of poems, Silver, is studded all over with that heavy metal and its shiny color. It’s ironic, then, that Silver, as a physical book in the hand, is barely there (too tempting not to say that Silver is a sliver), a pennyweight collection that only manages to fill out its fifty-odd pages thanks to some generous padding in the margins. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong about this thinness. But of the 27 poems on display, there are precisely three that are apt to make any kind of mark on the serious reader of poetry. Don’t get me wrong; these are poems worth reading—these three—but the ratio is a paltry one in nine. The remaining supermajority play a familiar game, all too frequently bogging themselves down in abstractions and word play. Philipps is particularly fond of the permutative properties of repetition, and paradox finds its own leashless expression just about everywhere. These are useful tools no doubt, and they can make compelling facets in a style, but their fight for attention in these pages means the words tend to resolve into little more than the sounds they produce.

What’s one to make of a line like “So I do and then I don’t as I do”? (And what does the speaker mean when he says “I learned to listen to what I see / But never quite to see what I hear”?) Somehow Philipps thought it was a good idea to provide two versions of the same poem—both titled “The First and Final Poem Is the Sun”—in place of the collection’s first and final poems. Another piece, “The Immortal Marsyas,” stands proudly on the page at only two lines in length (or maybe it’s two one-lined stanzas, the entirety of the page spanning the gap between “O, silver-lyred Apollo” and “gimme that”). A poem like “Rowan Tree” seems to confess some self-awareness about these self-defeating tendencies, but even here the approach is all wrong. A poem that is similarly antic with words, “RAS Syndrome” by Adam Fitzgerald, will entertain by teaching; you will learn from the poem that “The La Brea Tar Pits literally means ‘the the tar tar pits’” and that “River Avon and River Ouse both mean ‘river river.’” In Philipps’ version, the clichés pile up to limp ironic effect. Lines like “I was a present to myself but went / Right past it” are t-shirt worthy. That’s about it.

Still, when Philipps is good, he’s really good, conjuring up images as memorable as any in five thousand years of poetry. In “Romanticism,” he writes of “the sky still wet with slaughter, the vote / Done, dying goldenrod tuning the meadows / Beige under flocks of birds that flex the air / Into one black V after another.” And in “Paradise Lost” he tells of how

I find the world in flames,

Our tree frozen into rictus

And the front door gone.

But then I listen

For that color, that verb,

That mineral, that metal,

And after, the electric

Data of tattooed angels

Dancing on air.

These are wily stanzas, deceptively simple and effective, capable of getting in between one’s teeth like a sheet of tin foil. To silver something is, after all, to coat, cover, or plate it. It’s also to have one’s hair go gray or white. You can listen for that verb, as the speaker suggests, and you will hear it throughout, but Silver is frankly exasperating. When talent shines forth as fitfully as it does here, all you can do is wonder at how such an uneven collection ever made it into print.

Eric Bies is a high school English teacher based in Southern California.