Heaven: Poems
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
One of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2015
One of NPR's Best Books of 2015
Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry
"Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in Heaven, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's Paradise to Homer's Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.
"Feeling, real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture, is / Beyond a god's touch"—but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood, on two paintings by Chuck Close, on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio, on an elk grazing outside his window, his language remains eternally intoxicating, full of play, pathos, and surprise.
"The end," he writes, "like / All I've ever told you, is uncertain." Or, elsewhere: "The only way then to know a truth / Is to squint in its direction and poke." Phillips—who received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award—may not be certain, but as he squints and pokes in the direction of truth, his power of perception and elegance of expression create a place where beauty and truth come together and drift apart like a planet orbiting its star. The result is a book whose lush and wounding beauty will leave its mark on readers long after they've turned the last page.
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Rowan Ricardo Phillips. (2015). Heaven: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Rowan Ricardo Phillips. 2015. Heaven: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Heaven: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
MLA Citation (style guide)Rowan Ricardo Phillips. Heaven: Poems. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
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- bioText: Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of three books of poems (Living Weapon, Heaven, and The Ground), two essay collections (The Circuit and When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness), and a translation from the Catalan of Salvador Espiru's collection of short fiction, Adriane in the Grotesque Labyrinth. His awards include a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing, and the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award. Phillips is a Professor of English at Stony Brook University and teaches Creative Writing at Princeton. He lives in New York City and Barcelona.
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One of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2015
One of NPR's Best Books of 2015
Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry
"Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in Heaven, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's Paradise to Homer's Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.
"Feeling, real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture, is / Beyond a god's touch"—but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood, on two paintings by Chuck Close, on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio, on an elk grazing outside his window, his language remains eternally intoxicating, full of play, pathos, and surprise.
"The end," he writes, "like / All I've ever told you, is uncertain." Or, elsewhere: "The only way then to know a truth / Is to squint in its direction and poke." Phillips—who received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award—may not be certain, but as he squints and pokes in the direction of truth, his power of perception and elegance of expression create a place where beauty and truth come together and drift apart like a planet orbiting its star. The result is a book whose lush and wounding beauty will leave its mark on readers long after they've turned the last page.- reviews
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- source: Elizabeth Lund, The Washington Post
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"In Heaven, Rowan Ricardo Phillips explores what heaven is - or might be. As with Phillips's first collection, The Ground which won the 2013 Whiting Award, this slim volume is full of grace and beauty . . . No matter where he goes, his language is hauntingly astute, and the reality he conjures is multi-layered."
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- source: Diego Baez, Booklist
- content: "Phillips demonstrates extraordinary range and remarkable acuity . . . Consistently smart and clearly talented, Phillips is one to read now and to watch for in the future."
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- source: John Poch, 32 Poems Magazine
- content: "It most often seems to me that English is not a particularly beautiful language, but Rowan Ricardo Phillips's poetry argues eloquently against that. His ear for the language, sound and syntax, is inherited through Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, clowningly playful while serious, repetitive while new, grounded in the city as well as a sheep meadow though highly philosophical and airy as a snow angel . . .when Phillips strides into his own rhythms and visions, as in "The Once and Future King of Ohio" (note the last, sublime perspective of this poem taking place in a rear view mirror), I think he is one of the best young poets I've read in years."
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May 18, 2015
Phillips (The Ground), in his second collection, deals in illusions, highlighting the hidden wonders he finds within the world. In measured poems that echo conversations one might have in a museum, Phillips presents scenes that build to final-line revelations. Along the way, he mulls various aspects of the concept of heaven—the realness of it, the mutations of it. Phillips opens in “Perpetual peace. Perpetual light,” yet “it all seems graffiti.” In order to investigate more deeply, he analyzes scenes from Dante and Homer, even turning to artist Chuck Close, a fellow illusionist. Close’s paintings appear to be hyperrealistic portraits from far away, but when seen up close, they disintegrate into small dots and blobs of dissonant color, as if Close were painting the atoms of his subjects. In his quest to see beyond the visible into the atoms of the world, Phillips has a transformative experience in viewing one of Close’s paintings. The poet also discovers that it is possible for people to find heaven in each other, and that heaven always shifts and changes; it is indefinable. Phillips is awestruck by that ambiguity, and though he doesn’t see the pearly gates in his source material, he revels in the search.
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June 1, 2015
As a translator, a poet, and the author of a scholarly work, When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (2010), Phillips demonstrates extraordinary range and remarkable acuity. His second poetry collection delivers a loosely linked series of poems that allude to one another, but the result is less like a concept album than a series of inventive riffs on a common theme: the heavens and the great beyond, which is in stark opposition to, or perhaps complements, the title of his debut collection, The Ground (2012). Phillips plays with traditional forms and writes verse rich with clever introspection (as he alludes to the rowan tree found in Homer's Odyssey), aglow with astral imaginings (the radiant malaise of Ursa Minor in black stellate subheaven ), lush with architectural detail ( plum and pear-green / Parapets, pomegranate balustrades ), and filled with playful, rhyming narratives ( A gray scholar near the end of his talk / Pauses, turns hazel in the maze of his thoughts ). Consistently smart and clearly talented, Phillips is one to read now and to watch for in the future.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)
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One of The Washington Post's Best Poetry Collections of 2015
One of NPR's Best Books of 2015
Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry
"Who the hell's heaven is this?" Rowan Ricardo Phillips offers many answers, and none at all, in Heaven, the piercing and revelatory encore to his award-winning debut, The Ground. Swerving elegantly from humor to heartbreak, from Colorado to Florida, from Dante's Paradise to Homer's Iliad, from knowledge to ignorance to awe, Phillips turns his gaze upward and outward, probing and upending notions of the beyond.
"Feeling, real feeling / with all its faulty / Architecture, is / Beyond a god's touch"—but it does not elude Phillips. Meditating on feverish boyhood, on two paintings by Chuck Close, on Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, on a dead rooster by the side of the road in Ohio, on an elk grazing outside his window, his language remains eternally intoxicating, full...- sortTitle
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