Poetry
Philip Gross has published twenty poetry collections, including four for children, and won many of the major awards in British poetry, from the National Poetry Competition to the TS Eliot Prize. With thirty years of appearances at festivals and venues, Philip's readings create a feeling not so much of a performance as a conversation. Click on a cover image to find out more about the book.
The following poems and readings are from Philip's recent single-author books. On separate pages you will see and hear some poems for young people , and to meet some poems from collaborative books .
BETWEEN THE ISLANDS
The two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living — friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross's writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation — with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care.
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‘Gross's eye is sharp, searching right up to the edge of tangibility, pressing at the margins of the sense, 'on the lip of the known / world’ (Equator), so that it verges on metaphysics,’ writes Seán Hewitt in Poetry Ireland.
‘This collection finds the poet at his most socially astute and, coupled with his startlingly good portrayals of the natural world, is both sublime and challenging reading. Highly recommended.’ Edmund Prestwich in Poetry Salzburg.
‘Gross, even when writing of the most serious subjects, is by nature linguistically playful and fortunately never tries to suppress this. His wry epitaph for Brighton’s West Pier (Nocturne with a View of the Pier) is both gently humorous and oddly moving, as humour can often be.… Nevertheless, this is at root a meditative collection, haunted and haunting. It often sounds edgily relevant and contemporary – the Somerset Levels, “chafed by long drainage”, waiting “for the sea to return, to be healed”.’ Sheenagh Pugh (live journal)
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BETWEEN THE ISLANDS Published by Bloodaxe 2020 ISBN ISBN: 9781780375069 £9.95
A BRIGHT ACOUSTIC
In these restlessly exploratory poems and sequences, the space between things is never empty, but alive with messages. Utterly physical even when it is at its most enquiring, Philip Gross's latest collection contemplates space and sound. Even silence reveals itself as multiple and individual. With each book in his ambitious series since The Water Table, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize, Gross has taken a new step in mapping where we live, in between language and the world. A Bright Acoustic looks at and way beyond the human, to a generously environmental view of the self in its relationships, at the same time playful and profound.
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‘For all the book's concern with the insubstantial and the disparate, at the end we find another way of looking at our presence in the world: the human body-and-soul as a form in which life is caught. A Bright Acoustic is a deeply interesting book, intellectual and playful while at once lyrical and sensitive.’ Anna Lewis, Wales Arts Review
‘Philip Gross's A Bright Acoustic is a homage to the act of listening. These poems not only chart the varied noises that surround us, drawing attention to both urban and natural soundscapes, but they also resonate with their own sound-effects. Gross' form is similarly striking, and his use of indented lines and white space fits well with his exploration of noise and silence, the empty spaces on the page echoing the 'hundred shades of silence' that Gross paints with his words. Susannah Evans, New Welsh Reader
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A BRIGHT ACOUSTIC Published by BLOODAXE 2017 ISBN-13: 978-1780373683 paperback £9.95
LOVE SONGS OF CARBON
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross' 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age — inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as — especially as — it faces entropy and decay.
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‘At the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence — what water is and does in The Water Table , the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing... Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses.“ John Burnside & Jane Draycott, PBS Bulletin
‘Though only in his early sixties, Gross has made his own ageing the theme of Love Songs of Carbon , which combines a kind of ecological serenity with the port's continuing close-up fascination with physical matter. In it, geological time, the phases of the tides, human and non-human life-spans, the breakdown and recycling of ships and fruit and memory are all dimensions of the same present moment. These poems don't challenge us to shift perspective, but to hold all perspectives in mind at once.’ Kate Bingham, Poetry Review
‘Love Songs of Carbon is remarkable for many reasons, but perhaps most of all for its simplicity. The poems are written as if something has shaken loose, come clear at last to the narrator, and this clarity lends a sharp insightfulness to poems that span the distance between the very personal and the quite literally universal.’ Ashley Owen, New Welsh Review
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LOVE SONGS OF CARBON Published by BLOODAXE 2015 ISBN-13: 978-1780372587 paperback £9.95
LATER
Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's weakening hold on the borderline between the present and the traumas of the past. It follows the journey to the end. then beyond, to the tentative byways through which mourning moves. With an instinct for form that both controls and releases depths of feeling, Philip Gross writes poetry that proves it can be trusted with the most raw yet essential things of life.
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‘Later is a magnificent extended elegy, formally adventurous, poised between narrative and metaphysics, themes and variation.’ Carol Rumens, Poetry Review
‘This is a collection which consistently grips, involves and challenges; it confirms Philip Gross as one of our most consistently interesting and skilful poets.’ . Tony Brown, New Welsh Review
‘Philip Gross is an extraordinary poet whose work leaps across boundaries...’ Alison Brackenbury, Poetry Wales
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LATER Published by BLOODAXE 2013 ISBN 978-1-85224-979-3 paperback £9.95
DEEP FIELD
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
Shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2012
In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him — through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself.
Readers who admired Philip Gross's subtlety and range in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection will find those qualities brought to a new human urgency in the compelling sequences of Deep Field.
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‘This book speaks directly to the heart of Lapidus concerns with how language can convey, transcend and re-enchant human experience. Philip Gross has not only honoured his father but created something of great beauty and wonder out from those final wordless years.’ Victoria Field, Lapidus Journal
‘A powerful and tender successor to the T S Eliot prize-winning The Water Table . The writing is sinewy, urgent and resourceful. This poet is a master of form, deploying his visual and aural patterns for emphasis, as if the page were a musical score... The collection evokes an essence of what it is to be human, the sense of both wonder and estrangement, our place within science, the sheer oddness of who we are. Deep Field is as strong in celebration as in lamentation. With language as its theme, it soars linguistically.’ PBS Bulletin — selectors' comments
‘Philip Gross's previous collection, the T. S. Eliot Prize-winning The Water Table , suggested a deepening vision based on focused contemplation of the world and our place — or lack of place — within it. This new collection takes us deeper still, sustaining with extra-ordinary virtuosity a series of meditative variations on the related themes of language and wordlessness, human existence and the loss of identity.’ Jem Poster, Planet
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DEEP FIELD Published by Bloodaxe 2011 ISBN 978-1-85224-8919-6 paperback —8.95
THE WATER TABLE
Winner of the T S Eliot Poetry Prize 2009
A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Môr Hafren, the Severn Sea.
Philip Gross's meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.
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‘A book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence’ Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judge's comment
‘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
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Published by Bloodaxe 10 November 2009 ISBN 978-1-85224-852-9 paperback £8.95
THE EGG OF ZERO
Shortlisted for the Roland Matias Prize 2006
The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing — not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them.
This is the not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. By turns meditative, subtle, searching, playful and direct, this is poetry to engage the heart and mind.
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‘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
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Published by Bloodaxe, March 2006 ISBN 1-85224-726-6 paperback £7.95
MAPPA MUNDI
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation
The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders.
These new poems are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as travellers' tales of antiquity.
Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies.
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’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
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Published by Bloodaxe, Newcastle 2003 ISBN 1-85224-622-7 paperback £7.95
CHANGES OF ADDRESSPoems 1980-98
A Poetry Book Society Special Commendation
From its opening page — a refugee's first sight of England ‐ this book presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of 'home'.
It gathers work from all Philip Gross' earlier collections, many of which are out of print, including all of the Whitbread-Prize-shortlisted The Wasting Game with its moving sequence about anorexia.
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’From its opening page — a refugee's first sight of England — this book presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of 'home'. It gathers work from all Philip Gross' earlier collections, including all of the Whitbread-Prize-shortlisted The Wasting Game with its moving sequence about anorexia, of which Helen Dunmore wrote “These are elegies for the living, piercing in their clarity and depth of feeling.“‘
’...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
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Published by Bloodaxe, Newcastle 2001 ISBN 1-85224-572-7 paperback £9.95
Earlier poetry collections
THE WASTING GAME
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation — shortlisted for Whitbread Prize
(Bloodaxe, 1998) ISBN 1 85224 479 8
THE SON OF THE DUKE OF NOWHERE
(Faber, 1991) ISBN 0 571 16140 5
CAT'S WHISKER
(Faber, 1987) ISBN 0 571 14894 8
THE ICE FACTORY
(Faber, 1984) ISBN 0 571 13217 0
FAMILIARS
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(Peterloo Poets, 1983) ISBN 0 905291 46 8
