Description
Book SynopsisPOETRY BOOK SOCIETY RECOMMENDATION
Living Weapon ''is in conversation with a vast cast of historic forebears who enliven Phillips's examination of the meaning, morality and musicality of poetry, his living weapon'. . . and he is an eloquent and persuasive converser.'' Kate Caoimhe Arthur, PN Review
Living Weapon is a love song to the imagination, a new blade of light homing in on our political moment. A winged man plummets from the troposphere, four police officers enter a phone store, concrete pavements hang overhead. Phillips ruminates on violins and violence, on hatred and pleasure, on turning forty-three, even on the end of existence itself. His poetry reveals the limitations of our vocabulary, showing that our platitudes are inadequate to the brutal times we find ourselves in. And yet, through interrogation of allegory and symbol, names and things, time and musicality, a language of grace and urgency is found. For still our lives go on, and th
Trade Review
'Throughout the collection, Rowan Ricardo Phillips refuses to abandon the past; instead, he interrogates its ghosts - in all their terrible admixture of violence and beauty - and, despite every reason not to, he sings.' - Will Brewbaker, Los Angeles Review of Books
'Phillips brilliantly uses poetry to probe contemporary life and all its tensions, and provide a clear-sighted respite from those tensions. Written by a master of form and tone, Living Weapon is essential reading.' - Nick Laird
