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Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s poem “,” in ’s Winter issue, begins with the line, “Music for when the music is over.” It’s how he defines a poem and it’s a phrase that appears as the title of a piece in his 2012 collection, . Musical is exactly what the poems in this collection are. The language flows and skips within and between lines, pausing on occasion to cycle through refrains, so gracefully that you are nearly stunned when you remind yourself that the words are unaided by instruments. They are in many ways mythic, making characters of Orpheus, Eurydice, and Dante, as well as the poet himself. But don’t be put off by the nominal associations with the realm of the dead; these poems are very much alive with sensuality and they exist in Phillips’s physical world, which includes Harlem, the West Indies, and Barcelona. This collection is charged with urgency, which is signaled at the start, in the final lines of the first poem: “ I touched the tattooed is curing the beginning let me through. / And everywhere was blurring halogen. Love the place that / welcomed you.”  —