Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s slightly off-kilter poems promise more than they deliver, but they have crotchets and quavers (and notes too flat or sharp) that suggest a poetic imagination still under construction. Heaven, his second book, is full of heavens large and small—so many it seems he’s been taking backhanders from the heaven lobby for product placement.1 The poems have an ambitious range, moving trippingly through the minefield of pop culture, with titles that mark off large territory and over-the-shoulder glances at the Paradiso and Hamlet.
Phillips has a range of styles, though his voice is usually James Earl Jones-ish, as serious as Echo testing echoes.
Perpetual peace. Perpetual light.
From a distance it all seems graffiti.
Gold on gold. Iridescent, torqued phosphors.
But still graffiti. Someone’s smear on space.
A name. A neighborhood. X. X was Here.
X in the House. A two-handed engine
Of aerosols hissing Thou Shalt Not Pass
On fiery ground.
I admire a poet who can move so sparely, so choppily, from the sidelong reference to “Kilroy was here” to Milton’s “two-handed engine,” from the Biblical “Thou Shalt Not Pass” to, later, “text me.” Phillips is comfortably uncomfortable between worlds, past and present, low and high, hell and heaven—like Mohammed’s coffin.
His translation of the meeting between Odysseus and the shade of Ajax has at fifty lines too much filigree and added fat; but he takes on Homer with attitude,
