The Ground
Poems
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A masterful debut from a powerfully original poetic voice
A poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips's debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips's poems limn the troubadour's journey in an increasingly surreal modern world ("I plugged my poem into a manhole cover/That flamed into the first guitar"). The origin of mankind, the origin of the self, the self's development in the sensuous world, and––in both a literal and figurative sense––the end of all things sing through Phillips's supple and idiosyncratic poems. The poet's subtle formal sophistication—somewhere between flair and restraint—and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary world and the eroded permanence of the archaic one through remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stanzas, myths and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with lived life and the life of the imagination––both equally vivid and true––as they lay the framework for Phillips's meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This lyrical and richly allusive debut is in large part a meditative elegy for New York City in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, but it's also restitution for losses the city has endured. "I plugged my poem into a manhole cover," begins "Terra Incognita," "and made from where there once was/ Ground a sound instead to stand on." To this end, we get the bluesy "Song of Fulton and Gold," which memorializes the towers' fall ("The eye seeking home/ has to lower/ lower/ lower") and the terrorized "A Vision through the Smoke" ("No I I knew could clear the clouding mirror"). Yet much of the book's brilliance derives from gleeful bounding through literary history (echoes of Stevens are particularly audible) into a successful pastiche of scholarly erudition and pop culture carnivalesque. "Purgatorio, XXVI: 135 148" slides from standard English that recalls Dante's tercets into Bob Marley's Rasta argot ("But I nah know ting bout dem but what I sing"). "Apocalypse with Sasquatch" imagines a ruined metropolis in language redolent of Milton and in which a yeti speaks "from the last penthouse window/ Of the crumbling co-op facing flowering Abingdon Square." When the poems leave New York for other cities St. Petersburg, Stockholm, Barcelona they slow and breath more quietly, as if liberated.
