The Ground: Poems

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

A masterful debut from a powerfully original poetic voice

A poignant and terse vision of New York City unfolds in Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s debut book of poetry. A work of rare beauty and lyric grace, The Ground is an entire world, drawn and revealed through contemplation of the post-9/11 landscape. With musicality and precision of thought, Phillips’s poems limn the troubadour’s journey in an increasingly surreal modern world (“I plugged my poem into a manhole cover / That flamed into the first guitar”). The origin of mankind, the origin of the self, the self’s development in the sensuous world, and––in both a literal and a figurative sense––the end of all things sing through Phillips’s supple and idiosyncratic poems. The poet’s subtle formal sophistication—toggling between flair and restraint—and sense of lyric possibility bring together the hard glint of the contemporary world and the eroded permanence of the archaic one via remixes, underground sessions, Spenserian stanzas, myths, and revamped translations. These are poems of fiery intelligence, inescapable music, and metaphysical splendor that concern themselves with both lived life and the life of the imagination—equally vivid and true––as they lay the framework for Phillips’s meditations on our connection to and estrangement from the natural world.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Hardcover

First published May 22, 2012

About the author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven (2015) and The Ground( 2012). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Kasandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

These poems are deceptive in their apparent simplicity, full of rhythm and rhyme and playful, intelligent language. They're suffused with a sense of longing, but that longing is hopeful rather than hopeless. What's being explored here feels like basic humanity, especially as earth-dwellers tied to our planet (the sun and moon and stars are used frequently to allude to strivings for transcendence or the attempt to divine the holy in the natural world), but also, the facts of life in a modern city where one is largely anonymous come into play. Even though the setting is New York here for the most part, one doesn't have to be intimately familiar with the landscape of that city to see these poems and feel them come to life. They're eloquent songs of both belonging and unfamiliarity at the same time, both accomplished and modest, written in a voice confident enough to be self-mocking. A great read, and a definite re-read; I will have to search out more of Phillips' work.

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

The Ground is absolute trash. Phillips's poems come in three flavours: repetitive & adolescent, self-aggrandizing, and allusion to the classics. Most of the time he writes about death and NYC by night, with a few other things thrown in.

Too many of his poems use repetition ineffectively. It gets very bland and annoying.
Exhibit A: from "Song of Fulton and Gold" (p.4):

The eye seeking home
has to lower
               lower
                  lower

lower. The eye seeking
home has to
lower.

          *

[repeat this verbatim for the next three stanzas]

Exhibit B: from "Abingdon Square Park" (p. 19):

I once had had a thought
About a thought I once had had

About whether it was natural
For nature to seem so natural

Exhibit C: from "Aubade, Vol. 2 : The Underground Session" (p. 60):

No one I know knows the real ends of when. (What?)
No one I know knows the real end of when. (What?)
No one I know knows for real when to end. Again.

No one I know knows for real when to end. (What?)
No one I know knows the real end of when. (What?)
No one I know knows the real ends of when.

It's like Jaden Smith's twitter account with excessive copying-and-pasting.

Aside from an abundance of repetitive, pseudo-intellectual poems, Phillips has a slight obsession with Dante and Orpheus and Eurydice. I'm too lazy to count, but there are about 5-6 poems that rehash the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice without adding anything interesting, and about 3 poems that allude to The Divine Comedy. So roughly 20% of the book is blatantly unoriginal.

He writes a poem about his name ("Proper Names in the Lyrics of Troubadours), which reads like something a fourth grader would write as an attempt to sound "so deep" and justify it with "b-b-but identity!" His poem "To the Reader" (p.18) is equally vapid with a tone that tries to be both nonchalant and boastful:

If you want to talk to me you'll send me
An email. If you don't know my email
You can Google it. If that's not enough

You can pay a site for all my info
And then use Google Maps to find my street.

After reading this book, I have no idea who would want to talk to Phillips. The final thing that pissed me off is the formatting of the book, specifically how the Table of Contents takes up five pages. It's a shallow attempt to make his poems seem important...but sadly, they aren't. In this entire collection there were two lines that I thought were worthwhile: "Another September night/That is cool, that is/Cool as though the moon is a mouth/That blows on its wound" (p. 10 "Embrace the Night and Get Thee Gone), and "the sea stayed jade/We prayed" (p. 32 "The Greenness of the Ground"). There. I've given you the only good parts of this collection, now avoid it at all costs.


Poems that I liked:
0/44 (0%) !!!

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just beautiful lines, musical, with the rhythm of a good boxer. Poems you can inhabit.

[Clifford Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Poems with wonderful imagery, dazzling phrases, a sense of the tragic and yet great humor. Wonderful work.

[Kevin · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was deep and sticky. I felt like I was slowly sinking into the deepest parts of oceans as I progressed through this book, or maybe like a penny dropped into a jar of honey. No doubt that Ricardo Phillips is brilliant. He is academic and a poet of poets.

On the back cover, Lawrence Joseph writes, “Phillips’s acute sense of the poet as an outsider - one who writes from what is essentially a position of critique - is an integral part of The Ground. The book is grounded not only in the brilliant sense of what the art of American poetry is today, but also dazzling, totally original combinations of language and form, geography and autobiography, history, myth, and religion.” This is the perfect description of the collection, but it is worth reading to experience for yourself.

I expect that I will read this again, and upgrade my review to four stars. Then, I will read it again, and update my review to five stars.

Note: I bought this from the DU bookstore while attending the 2018 CCTM conference.

[Jordan · Rating 3 out of 5]

I remember really enjoying this collection when I was in college, but on this read I just didn't connect with it. The number of poems about poetry felt a little presumptuous and self-indulgent for a debut collection (and believe me, as someone who wrote plenty of poems about poetry long before I was any good at it, I know whereof I speak), and his poems are often filled with images but very little connective tissue or grounding details for the reader to cling onto. I just never felt particularly moved or interested by it.

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 3 out of 5]

A bit uneven, but I connected with enough of these offerings that I would be curious about new work. Fair amount of greek mythology references here that wizzed by me. Still, a learned, and occasionally clever collection.

[Brady Dean Jackson · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We are the world and what’s wrong with the world is what the birds grow tired of singing.”

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

The 44 poems in this volume are a mixture of city-poems and myth-poems; characters and allusions (Orpheus and Eurydice, Dante) recur, along with images (two different poems include the image of "a tree half aflame" inside the speaker). Phillips's language is one of gorgeous rhythms, whether the syntax is straightforward or more complicated: "Tonight I touched the tattooed skin of the building I was born in," the speaker of "Tonight," the opening poem, says. In "Tabula Rasa," a poem that's all questions, addressed to the Poem itself, the speaker asks: "Are you what's gold in the mind's gray-green/Weather?" I love stanzas like this, from "Hell Gate, East River, New York" (and love this opening image, too, Manhattan as body):

Over the shorter shoulder of Manhattan,
Under gilded malts and molten-gold clouds, birds,
Lowering, seen as they were, lit by first light

Some poems are, explicitly or allusively, about 9/11; my favorite of these is "Embrace the Night and Get Thee Gone," wih is forward-then-backward structure and beautiful phrases. Phillips is great with similes, like this, from "Music for When the Music Is Over": "We live like the one sequin/In a sequined dress that thinks it's the dress/Although it merely blurs from other lights/Ablaze and bending." Or this, from "Aubade, Vol. 2: The Underground Sessions":

As when a drinking collared deer
Hears a noise and
Although safe by being Caesar's
Feels a strange freedom there in that second,
Some sense in the gut, a thunder of ribs,
A surge in the blood, some cinched memory
Of not being Caesar's,

[Sarah]

Some of these were wonderful.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Bubbling with New York city-love and city-night-sky-love, with a beguiling mix of high and hip diction and music. And excitingly smart.

[Emily Sadofsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is book is full of poetry based on/surronding the event of 9/11. The poems never state exactly what he is talking about. Phillips wants to readers to interpret the poems in there own way. He even writes a poem explaining about how poetry is ment to be interpreted by the reader in anyway they want. He used format structure as well as his diction to explain the emotions and events that people felt. 10/10 would read again. Already read it twice.

[Kate]

Great first book. I felt like the poetry matured throughout the book, becoming more formally experimental...but honestly I preferred the pieces toward the beginning of the book. They sung more and felt more honest. Elijah has met him and he was a cool dude.