‘Silver’ Review: The Sonorous Music of Paradoxes

Rowan Ricardo Phillips sings a melody as sharp and cutting as metal in his latest collection, “Silver.” Across 27 poems, Phillips argues for the ability of sound to reveal significance in the world, turning toward the music of poetry to reflect on the things that make life meaningful. Accordingly, the rhythm of his work combined with his virtuosic command of literary devices allows for a language that is not only impactful, but pleasing to the ear. However, his pursuit of formal beauty and obsession with paradoxes sometimes obscures the content and meaning of the poems themselves.

From start to finish, Phillips makes it clear that his goal is not just to make poetry, but music. To begin his work he counts off “1, 2, 3, 4… / 1, 2…,” completing the rhythm of the measure with the two syllable title page, “Silver.” Having situated the entire work within the context of musical beats, Phillips doesn’t fail to deliver on his promise of a lyrical experience — each of his poems flows effortlessly with a smooth, unbroken rhythm.

This motif of song is recurrent throughout his work. This collection contains rife allusions to the world of music including harmony and instruments. He even titles one of his poems “Etude No. 5,” a gesture to the short compositions that musicians often play for practice.

Beyond the beauty of this motif, music also plays an important role in Phillips’s conception of what makes things meaningful. Early in the collection he asserts that “I can’t see what doesn’t sing / Or what I haven’t coaxed from some notes out / Of air,” suggesting that sound itself is the universal source of significance. In addition to being refreshingly novel, this framework gestures towards the vitality and worth hidden within all things, because — as Phillips argues through his poetry — nearly anything can vibrate with music.

The lyricism of Phillips’s work is made clear not only through his use of rhythm, but with the copious and elegant application of countless literary devices. Alliteration, rhyme, and assonance define his language, drawing connections between words and allowing the poetry to sing with a delicate formal beauty. He moves through each technique with the ease of a virtuoso, one stanza even dancing between four successive alliterative sequences across just three lines.

However, Phillips’ sonorous language and literary dexterity sometimes distracts him — and readers — from the content of his work. In order to complete a rhyme or create a pun from a near homophone, he will sometimes opt for imprecise language or syntactical structures that are difficult to penetrate. For instance, Phillips often draws on the double negative and similarly dense structures to achieve a certain stable rhythm to his work. In the poem “Romanticism” he writes, “So I do and then I don’t as I do,” which, though beautiful, forces a reader to pause and consider the meaning. The density of his language contradicts his goal of making his poetry read like music, as the difficulty demands a halting silence for contemplation that interrupts the otherwise seamless rhythm of his work.

Furthermore, the content itself obscures its own meaning. Just as mirrored syntactic structures grind the reader to a halt, the stanzas themselves are burdened by contradiction. In a near-obsession with the aesthetics of paradox, Phillips will perhaps flippantly describe “dark things lightly / And light things darkly” just for the pleasure of dissonance. The contradictions feel underdeveloped and underthought, in addition to needlessly disrupting the rhythm and musicality of his work.

Despite these criticisms, Phillips’s new collection remains a series of poems with a nearly unparalleled formal and auditory beauty. Though readers may not turn to the work for its content, they will still be delighted with a concert of lyrical poetry. Best read aloud, the lightweight collection “Silver” gives its audience easy access to bite-sized poems that argue for the aural beauty of language and life.

—Staff writer John M Weaver can be reached at john.weaver@thecrimson.com.