Philip Gross

"Haunting, vividly imagined poems, whose fierce intelligence is gentled by the sonorous grace of the language ... A considerable poetic talent offers us an elegant and subtle re-evaluation of the modern world"Sarah Crown, The Guardian

"Some of the poems are marvellous, not because they are brave about their subject, not even because of the technique on display, but because they are electrifyingly well observed and beautifully written" David Morley, Poetry Review

"What Denison presents ­ the dark rootings of steel and concrete; the feeling of something slamming into the earth, establishing its narrow vocabulary of grass, stone, mould, leaf, strut, and the strange, focused moony chill that freezes everything ­ moves through the clarity, steadiness and humaneness of Philip Gross's verbal imagination to create something new. And that, after all, is the idea: the making new, the exploration, or apprehension of the way things are too much and terrible ... there always being something else under and beyond the changing names of things." From the Preface by George Szirtes

"Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate ... he touches an alien, intractable dimension ... Gross's poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers" Terry Eagleton, Independent on Sunday

"He should be recognised as one of England's very best poets, not only for the exuberance of his imagination, but because of what he is writing about" John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

"Nature, people, the obscurities of one's self, yield up their otherness in those epiphanic moments when Gross' peripheral eyesight catches them off guard.

His is a voice that is mordant, obsessive, compelling - but nonetheless grateful for the rewards of living..."
Poetry Book Society Bulletin

"...he should be recognized as one of England's very best poets, not only for the exuberance of his imagination, but because of what he is writing about.

An urban poet, who knows the rural mythologies and lost Romantic instincts, he has fixed many transient details of modern life for his readers;

but he also speaks, often playfully, and always with a consummate formal control, of a sense of nothingness...'
Times Literary Supplement

"Throughout this vigilant and human collection, Gross engages us in the drama of his poetry's self-aware twists and turns, as it explores unsimple feelings of loss, apprehension and love."
Times Literary Supplement

"These are elegies for the living, piercing in their clarity and depth of feeling."
Helen Dunmore

"...a contemporary response to the power of two famous ancient circles.

John Eaves' brooding pictures of Stonehenge draw poet Philip Gross into a game of shadows, at once playful and perceptive.

A medieval tragedy is the narrative thread for Gross' exploration of Avebury, treading a line between past and present, fact and fiction, irony and celebration, loss and love: a sensual vision mirrored in F.J.Kennedy's lively paintings..."
Mike Pitts, author of 'Hengeworld'

CONIUNCTIO: a Spell

with pochoir illustrations by Vance Gerry

Publication details:
Prospero Poets 1995
Limited edition of 499 copies