In the course of forty years an increasingly subtle conversation has evolved between words and silence at the core of Philip Gross's poetry. This is never more so than in the poems of this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee fathers birth.At this collections heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of Evi And The Devil weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.
The Shores of Vaikus is Philip Grosss 28th book of poetry, and his 13th from Bloodaxe, following The Thirteenth Angel (2022), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.
Recenzijos
Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Grosss latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent [ ] and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. [ ] His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book hes still seeking to do what the real poets doto translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences. -- Stuart Henson * London Grip * The Shores of Vaikus is a rich and rewarding collection, thanks largely to the adept deployment of language in ways that provide a welcome aesthetic jolt, but it is also a profound reflection on belonging not just only to our primary landscape, but to the earth as a whole. [ ...] Its a pleasure to read a volume of poetry that is so alert to the multifarious contingencies of history. -- Tom Phillips * The High Window * Philip Grosss latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled Translating Silence, we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil. [ ] Alongside his extraordinary yet historically based imaginative quest, he gives us glimpses which allow the reader to centre. For sharing a lifetime of seeing and feeling, and for honing and polishing the lens of his vision/craft, we can be deeply grateful. -- Dana Littlepage Smith * The Friend, on The Shores of Vaikus * Philip Grosss The Thirteenth Angel is a book with its finger firmly on the pulse of the sounds of the contemporary world... Gross uses language which is precise and sharp one moment and then veers into a familiar colloquial style the next, which makes him intensely readable. -- Mona Arshi * PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022 * Mastery is what you would wish for in a 27th collection and it is what you find in Philip Grosss The Thirteenth Angel, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize... His easy, fluent ways with form contrast with his conflicted subject matter. He has a questing eye and now, more than ever, writes to make sense of the world in its inexplicable multiplicity. -- Kate Kellaway * The Observer (Poetry book of the month) * The Thirteenth Angel, like all Philip Grosss work, fuses the physical and the metaphysical, and lights the profoundest subject matter with shafts of playful humour. He is a poet with exceptional gifts of observation, whether its a panoramic view of the earth and its inhabitants or the mutterings of quiet circumstance / under the threshold of attention'. -- Jean Sprackland * chair of judges, T.S. Eliot Prize 2022 *
Translating Silence
13 The Old Country
15 Introits
17 A Place Called Vaikus
21 Erratics
25 The Point
26 The Crossing
27 Evi And The Devil
Translating Silence
79 Now, in Vaikus
83 A Monument in Vaikus
88 Five Versions of Vaikus:
88 A forest, a real one
89 If its the silence
90 Aside
91 Just when we thought
93 Learning to speak
95 Another Shore
Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 28th book of poetry, The Shores of Vaikus, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024. His previous collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. That followed eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cats Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.
Philip Gross's poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).
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