The Living Weapon in Rowan Ricardo Phillips: the “Black Screen”

A strong collection of poems, Phillips’s Living Weapon builds upon itself, cradling the reader in a web as a spider would an insect. There is no escape from the truth it presents: death in the form of the “black mirror,” modernity and its oppression, is inescapable. Modernity’s truths— “life, light, flowers, and bee”—are the things for which the voice in “Halo” implores its reader to “let [the poem] go: forget it if you can” [emphasis added]. The implication then is that one cannot; the message, too resonant, echoes around the reader, webbed to current events in the States and thus even the international reader’s gaze, media, and the “white haze[s] of [history’s] cell” which flickers on through the night. Thus, through sound and symbols—the most particular being the “black screen”—Phillips creates an interweaving metonym on the relevance of the cellphone and modern media, its perceptions hindering and skewing mankind and the self from its own view.

One of the most relevant poems in divulging the meaning of the “black screen” in relation to history, “A Tale of Two Cities” calls upon the history of Dicken’s Paris and all cities built upon cities: “City above the city and city/ Below.” Like Rome, Paris hides catacombs underneath its streets, but the French counterpart is more famous for its vides de carrières (quarry voids), many of which remain unexplored or charted only in secret.[1] In this reality is reasserted a certain correlation between history and the modern day: there is an irritative, “iridescent [light]” that shines from “these buildings” in the city below onto “its clouds,” us. “We are all part/ Of another life’s constellation.” In this way, the title is more than apt. As Dickens wrote in his novel of the same name, “It was…the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness…it was the spring of Hope…we were all going direct to Heaven.”[2] Thus, the darkness and light intermingle in the final two lines of Phillips’s poem, as if in a dance of death, a tango.

If read individually, this poem would leave the reader guessing as to what its implications could mean for Heaven then, but by “Thoughts and Prayers,” Phillips has already answered this within his collection. It is “the dungscape,” the opposite of what Catholicism teaches but the truth which only Lucifer and, one can infer, the “constellate of apostate dead” know. Then evil is “the death/ Of change,” which Phillips reasserts time and again is happening now, history repeating itself. Burning as a traditional Hell would—but more importantly, as an overheated cell phone does—in “November Nocturne,” the “last words/ Of Spring” burn. The “spring of hope” Dicken calls in his first sentence is thus dying, as it was then, opposed to Dicken’s “winter of despair.”

In this, even poetry is mutilated by the “black screen.” In “The Night of the Election,” “Seamus Heaney’s poem,” which from Phillips’s title, content, and context (being written during 2020 election) one can infer is “The Cure of Troy” as quoted by then-Presidential-candidate Joe Biden, is reduced to “a thing a looked at, not read.” It is reduced to this screen, a video of a speech to be played rather than fully understood. The “gorged bulb [of a phone] glisten[s]” rather than the truth of the poem itself. And then, what is left that is not warped by modernity’s onlooking gaze? In this metonym, Phillips posits nothing is. This reality is inescapable.

[1] For more on the underground labyrinth and its history, refer to: Natasha Geiling, “Beneath Paris’ City Streets, There’s an Empire of Death Waiting for Tourists,” Smithsonian Magazine, March 14, 2014, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/travel/paris-catacombs-180950160/; Robert Macfarlane, “The Invisible City Beneath Paris,” The New Yorker, March 23, 2019, https://www.newyorker.com/news/dispatch/the-invisible-city-beneath-paris. [2] Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Penguin Books, 2003).