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Heaven
Long-listed for the National Book Award in poetry
A spectacularly vibrant and continually surprising collection from one of the poetry world's rising young stars
"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.
A spectacularly vibrant and continually surprising collection from one of the poetry world's rising young stars
"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.
- GenresPoetry
61 pages, Hardcover
First published June 16, 2015
7 people are currently reading
295 people want to read
About the author
Rowan Ricardo Phillips
15 books33 followersRowan 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.
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
July 19, 2015
A clearly talented poet. These just weren't my cup of tea. Too fancy. Cold. I didn't feel anything. There are a couple excellent poems: Boys and Beatitudes of Malibu stood out for me as well as the last poem which was slick.
October 14, 2015
Read this because it was longlisted for the National Book Award for poetry in 2015.
Themed volumes of poetry can either be a hit or miss, and unfortunately I did not really enjoy heaven repeated throughout these poems. I think Phillips shines when he writes about real people in real places, the people he knows, rather than the gods of mythology, classical literature, and scriptures. Most of these poems are aiming higher than reality and they feel forced to me.
My favorites were:
The Beatitudes of Malibu
Pax Americana
"It looks like life, or its oasis."
Themed volumes of poetry can either be a hit or miss, and unfortunately I did not really enjoy heaven repeated throughout these poems. I think Phillips shines when he writes about real people in real places, the people he knows, rather than the gods of mythology, classical literature, and scriptures. Most of these poems are aiming higher than reality and they feel forced to me.
My favorites were:
The Beatitudes of Malibu
Pax Americana
"It looks like life, or its oasis."
November 26, 2016
These are poems about Heaven. They're either directly about Heaven as a physical and spiritual location or they describe a human situation or natural spot we'd think of in that way. They're sometimes about inhabitants of Heaven, though not always Christian as in the poem in which Apollo descends to earth. Others invoke Shakespeare and Dante. In some only the title lets the reader know where he is, as "The Primum Mobile." In the final poem Heaven can even be the bed of lovers and the "inner thigh / Of empyrean buttermilk and gold..." which I thought was my favorite kind of Heaven. I thought these were fine poems.
May 1, 2016
Phillips' poems are like diamonds with sharp edges, they'll cut you before you know it and damn, they brilliantly shine. Reaching back to the Greek underworld and Dante's paradise, these poems embroaden the unknowable afterlife and its earthly manifestations, its metaphors, its uncertainties. This is a book of magnitude, summoning all the force of a star in its eternal journey into deep space. "Heaven" is heaven indeed.
July 20, 2015
Wow. Every poem hits a different part of my soul. Just seeing ODB in a poem makes me happy then reading lines like "Who the hell's Heaven is this?" just make me crack up. A great follow-up to the Ground.
October 30, 2016
I recall seeing RRP read circa 2006 at Univ. of ND's Black Poetics conference and thinking that as the new kid he stood out. This is a solid collection, particularly the first half. At times there are some lazy bardic turns ("Nature: This is what it sounds like when I'm thinking" . The pastoral moments are strong, as are the understated autobiographical poems like "Boys". Lots of ideas and well-wrought lines-interested to see what's down the road. Thinking perhaps of the meteroic improvement of a guy like Terrrance Hayes, just exponential improvement across the first 3-4 collections. (Prolly a 3.5, but the bump for poets)
December 27, 2021
VALL DE NÚRIA
The white rose. The celestial silence.
The lake of light. The bed-like inner thigh
Of empyrean buttermilk and gold,
Call it what you will, it wakes me tonight.
Heaven reheavens. And the mind’s prelude
To the touch of your lips on my forehead,
On my neck, our drowned echoes celloing
In the dark like flames drawn on the ocean,
Is not the mind’s prelude but its heaven.
How somewhere not in Spain there’s a mountain
Borrowing your name, my soul is its snow,
And so in the summer I am nothing,
When all I want to do is lay my head
Down, lay my head down on the naked slope
Of your chest and listen there for my heart.
The white rose. The celestial silence.
The lake of light. The bed-like inner thigh
Of empyrean buttermilk and gold,
Call it what you will, it wakes me tonight.
Heaven reheavens. And the mind’s prelude
To the touch of your lips on my forehead,
On my neck, our drowned echoes celloing
In the dark like flames drawn on the ocean,
Is not the mind’s prelude but its heaven.
How somewhere not in Spain there’s a mountain
Borrowing your name, my soul is its snow,
And so in the summer I am nothing,
When all I want to do is lay my head
Down, lay my head down on the naked slope
Of your chest and listen there for my heart.
February 10, 2020
"The Barycenter
Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks
Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds
How this light, like a choir of silence
Queues in the air to sing the snowy mass
To shine, i don't know. And yet the chilled dusk,
Remarkable and rude, runs rouge and glows.
As though the blue poem of the Earth desired,
And became, the great rose poem of Heaven,
With its champagne peaks and savage thickets
And shrub and break and tangling bushes.
The poem that revolves in two directions
At once, circling us in two directions"
Alpenglow ripening the mountain peaks
Into rose-pink pyramids steeped in clouds
How this light, like a choir of silence
Queues in the air to sing the snowy mass
To shine, i don't know. And yet the chilled dusk,
Remarkable and rude, runs rouge and glows.
As though the blue poem of the Earth desired,
And became, the great rose poem of Heaven,
With its champagne peaks and savage thickets
And shrub and break and tangling bushes.
The poem that revolves in two directions
At once, circling us in two directions"
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 4, 2020
I loved this collection so much that I signed up for a writing workshop with Rowan at the 92Y in New York (which was one of the best workshops I've been in). Classically informed and formally inventive, Phillips hits all the right notes in this collection. Can't wait for his new book of poetry to come out in March.
May 25, 2023
This was a thought-provoking collection of poems centered on the concept of heaven in all its iterations: heaven on earth, what heaven is, heaven as paradise, etc. I greatly enjoyed it and sat with the poems for a long time instead of flying through the collection. Really, a great use of imagery and metaphor throughout.
March 18, 2019
Some really beautiful work with mesmerizing imagery. As someone who is a lover of classical lyrical poetry, this selection really suited my palette. Would high-key recommend.
December 18, 2021
“Even his red wine spritzer tastes like Skittles now”…
September 13, 2022
3.5 stars
January 1, 2025
Poised, elegant, taut poems that engage natural beauty and the mystery attendant on being alive yet too soon to be gone. The poem in homage to Shakespeare is remarkable.
March 9, 2016
Apollo and Marsyas was my favorite poem in this short collection. Rowan has an engaging cadence and use of diction in his lines and several shining verses standout in this volume and grab the eye and ear. It's just that he is a bit hard to follow at times in some of his lines...he uses "it" in a couple places and due to the preceding lines of the poem, it hard to tell what "it" he is actually referring too. Poems don't have to make any logical sense to be arresting or enjoyable, but when confusion is due to grammar and line placement, it breaks the conscious flow of the poem for me and turns the poem into a kind of halting problem that detracts from its trajectory.
February 5, 2017
A decent collection, Heavenly themes, usually pleasant, sometimes beautiful and astounding, but overall just kinda pretty not absolutely memorable, there were some really nice poems but this is not a book I'd buy.
December 28, 2015
Loved everything about this collection of poems.
August 30, 2016
It was okay. Nothing really grabbed me except for "Sin Verguenza"--that poem was good. I liked that one alot, but the rest of the poems didn't speak or call out to me or invoked in me much emotion.
December 9, 2015
I like the spirituality here. Lots of good lines in this collection.
March 24, 2016
Over abundance of abstraction, flaccid spirituality, and not a single risk taken.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews