Book Information
- Publisher
- FARRAR STRAUSS & GIROUX
- Published
- 2015-06-16
- Pages
- 80 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.43 x 1.19 x 21.59 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780374168520
- ISBN-10
- 9780374168520
- Price
- 2599 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/American
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Poetry Winner of the Nicolás Guillén Outstanding Book Award Finalist for the Griffin International Poetry Prize Long-listed for the National Book Award Long-listed for the PEN Open Book Award One of The Washington Posts Best Poetry Collections of 2015 One of NPRs Best Books of 2015 One of Flavorwires Best Poetry Books of 2015 "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." Phillipswho received a 2013 Whiting Writers' Award as well as the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Awardmay 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
-
Who Says There Aren't Great Contemporary Poets
Heaven is a collection of poems that satisfy on many levels. Phillips writes with authority, tightly controlling his meter while letting powerful metaphors drive his poems forward--I enjoyed almost all of the poems in this collection, which I read for a class about Imagery and Metaphor with poet Julie Sheehan. Very well worth the money, and I hope to see more of Phillips' musings.
-
Five Stars
Lovely
-
a personal heaven in Heaven
Heaven, more explicitly than most collections of poetry that I’ve read recently, spins a web of interconnecting ideas, images, and language that forces the reader to constantly turn back and back again to earlier poems in order to fully understand the later poems. By intentionally building upon these self-references, the poet, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, creates a self-sustaining world of language and ideas in Heaven in which each poem can stand alone, but is fuller in meaning when it merges with the whole. The poems work parallel and in tandem with each other -- “Mirror for the Mirror” (20) isn’t quite the same without the knowledge of “Mirror for the Mirror” (49). Another stand out poem, “Kingdom Come” (4), might just be the key to understanding most of these recurring themes, as it establishes how he wants us, his readers, to think about the notion of “Heaven” moving forward. First, he takes the time to establish what Heaven is not: the first two lines of the poem claim that by “Not knowing the difference between Heaven / And Paradise, he called them both Heaven.” So Heaven is not Paradise, but whoever this “he” is (the poet? a male-identified reader? a friend? a god?) does not have a solid grasp on the difference between the two. It becomes the poetry’s (and therefore the poet’s) job to suss out that difference. But as much as Heaven focuses on these large questions of language and afterlife, it is also a project about the personal, even if some of the poems are personal by opposition -- the explorations of gods (Apollo) and godliness (Shakespeare) eventually take a bend away from worship and towards complication of the self. For Phillips, a personal Heaven is a Heaven that is “happy to play / Along, [is] happy just to be happy / For once, and not an excuse for mayhem.” To take the notion of Heaven away from culture and to give it to the individual is to rid it of negative connotation -- it is not something to die for, but something that you find while living. Of course, this is only one poem out of many that reference Heaven, and so only the first to define it. It is a key definition, however, as it first erases any societal meaning, rewriting our assumptions. Perhaps that is an even more important precedent for Phillips’ collection than the definition: Heaven is the rewriting of a myth for the purpose of understanding the personal realm.
-
Young American poet
New young poet. worth reading.