Silver

<p><i>Silver </i>is a collection that shines with a guiding principle: that poetry, ‘part physics, part faith, part void’, can be found wherever it is looked for. Virtuosic in style, sharing the agility 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 alchemises imaginative experience and haptic, lived reality in poems that mine raw sensation, unearthing unexpected cultural ties.<br><br>''Not the meaning,'' he writes, ''but the meaningfulness of this mystery we call life.'' In his hands, poetry is both precision tool and glimmering refuge. Ranging through time and place, summoning fellow travellers along the way, the poems cast a silvery light, transforming all they touch with alluring strangeness and vibrancy.</p>