University College’s Shakespeare Society presents a launch event for the new poetry collection, Silver, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips, who is a highly acclaimed, multi-award-winning poet, author, screenwriter, academic, journalist, and translator. His previous poetry collections include The Ground (FSG, 2012), Heaven (FSG, 2015), Living Weapon (FSG, 2020). He is also the author of the critical work When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness (a new edition of which is forthcoming from FSG) and the nonfiction book The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey.

Published by Faber, Silver is virtuosic in style. Sharing the dexterity of the legendary Argentinian footballer, Lionel Messi, who is conjured in its pages, the poems shape-shift through blank verse, elegy, terza rima and rap. Phillips is confident in his unconfidence: ‘Not the meaning,’ he writes, ‘but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life’. The poems are luminous and dreamlike in their evocations of time and place, held in the light of a silvery moon that gives them their alluring strangeness and vibrancy.

The launch will be hosted in the 10 Merton Street Lecture theatre, to be followed by drinks in the lobby, where Gulp Fiction will be organising sales of Silver.

Register for free tickets here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/the-univ-shakespeare-society-presents-silver-by-rowan-ricardo-phillips-tickets-860767989227.