Like Philip Rowland’s previous collection, Something Other Than Other (2016), An Open Parenthesis gathers short poems into meticulously arranged sequences. Although the book is striking in its minimalism, it is not programmatically so: rather, it flexibly interweaves themes of city life, parenthood and poetics through a series of nine sections that can in the end be read as one long, book-length work. While drawing on the poet’s notable engagement with the haiku tradition, this collection moves into new areas and – as the title suggests – into a new openness and open-endedness.
Kris Kosaka reviews An Open Parenthesis in the Japan Times, saying ‘While absorbing the rhythms of Philip Rowland’s short poetry … there’s a wondrous sense of a maestro at play with meaning and lyricism through the precise arrangement of words. The Tokyo-based poet and editor of the short poetry journal NOON expands the expectations of a typical poetry collection in this luminous, multilayered read. Rowland composed … his fourth book of poetry as nine interwoven sequences that repeat motifs of music, parenthood, otherness, time and lyrical experimentation. These interlinking themes allow the entries to be read as both separate entities and parts of a complete work.’ Click here to read the whole review.
Billy Mills, in his blog Elliptical Movements, writes really well about the music and other aspects of Philip Rowland’s work in An Open Parenthesis, and concludes: ‘This is a book that grows with rereading, a book to live with for a while.’ Click here to read the whole review.
Few poets writing now, or even ever, get so much out of so little. Every word is weighed and placed, each poem an experience on the page and in the mind, immediately resonant, clear of clutter, looking outwards, hearing inwards. And what do we get out of it? Real and yet never forced or overdetermined insight. Poems of parenthood. The urban observation Charles Reznikoff would have written had he travelled the Tokyo public transport system rather than New York’s. And it’s not all just the concrete and minimal – the abstract and expansive have their place too. It’s hard to keep up with everything that’s worthwhile in the world of poetry, but An Open Parenthesisis a book you really should get hold of. – Alistair Noon
An Open Parenthesis is a masterful book. I cannot think of when I last read anything so compelling. Zukofsky and Corman would admire his faithfulness to every word, his clean lines, and his discreet narrative of love and family. – John Martone
Philip Rowland’s minimalist lines in An Open Parenthesis are still, close to subdued light & silence – ‘pausing to listen where the picture used to be’. There is an unusually strong sense of attentiveness, with composition registering the breath, such that ’the wait becomes / the destination’. – Peter Hughes
July 2022, 126 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 in / 140 x 210 mm, ISBN 978-4-907359-40-9
Click here to read an extract from this book.
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