Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s fourth collection is a book as lustrous as the metal of its title.

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.

This is work that brings into acute focus the singular and glorious power of poetry in our complex world.

“A collection to ponder in wonder.” —Michael Ruzicka, Booklist

“Musical and erudite, the latest from Phillips offers an extended ars poetica in which poetry is ‘a ritual that the sun organizes/ and arranges’ . . . Readers will take pleasure in this poetical flowering.” —Publishers Weekly

About the Authors:

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is most recently the author of Living Weapon. His next book, Silver, will be published this March. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at Stony Brook University, President of the Board of Directors of The New York Institute of the Humanities, and the poetry editor of The New Republic.

Henri Cole was born in Fukuoka, Japan, to a French mother and an American father. He has published ten previous collections of poetry and received many awards, including the Jackson Poetry Prize, the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, the Rome Prize, the Berlin Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and the Award of Merit Medal in Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also published Orphic Paris, a memoir. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts, and teaches at Claremont McKenna College.