Philip Gross with Peter Finch in Cardiff, March 2nd 2023
Launch reading in Cardiff for The Thirteenth Angel,
alongside veteran performer and experimentalist Peter Finch.
Launch reading in Cardiff for The Thirteenth Angel,
As an antidote to angels, a little demonology
Courtesy of the vivid, various, oceanic, world-girdling online journal Live Encounters, here’s A Preamble to the Demonology, my wry rationale for why I won’t be writing a book about demons to match The Thirteenth Angel, published by Bloodaxe in November, and currently shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize.
The Thirteenth Angel: T.S.Eliot Prize videos and focus
Click into the T.S.Eliot Prize site Shortlisted poets in focus to watch Philip interviewed and reading three sample poems from his shortlisted collection The Thirteenth Angel. You'll find Readers' Notes and a thoughtful commissioned review by John Field, as well as a way into the other shortlisted collections.
Gross and Steger launch reading, still available to watch
In a live-streamed launch reading on Tues 22 November 2022, Bloodaxe Books celebrated the publication of two new poetry collections: Philip Gross' The Thirteenth Angel, and Ales Steger's Burning Tongues.
Philip and Ales read, then with the help of well-placed questions from host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley, moved into a discussion of the books, the times we're in and the place of poetry. This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and remains there free to watch and listen on this YouTube page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K80MQ6kyTYg
The 13th Angel – on the TS Eliot Prize shortlist 2022
A Poetry Book Society Recommendation / Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize
Publication Date : 17 Nov 2022 Paperback £12.00 ISBN 9781780376356
With each new collection, Philip Gross’ poems extend their conversation between the metaphysical and the acutely physical. His sequences in The Thirteenth Angel scan from moment to moment like flickering needles, registering stress patterns in the world around us – ebbs and flows of weather or events, in our own bodies, in the city streets before and after the pandemic, or on the autoroutes of Europe with their undertow of human flight. If there are angels, they are nothing otherworldly, but formed by angles of incidence between real immediate things, sudden moments of clarity that may disturb, calm or exhilarate.
The Thirteenth Angel is Philip Gross’s 27th book of poetry, and his 12th from Bloodaxe.
https://www.philipgross.co.uk/wordpress/?p=677&preview=true
Divining Dante
A full online version of major international anthology for the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, Divining Dante, is now visible online, thanks to Recent Work press – three poems each, one for each book of the Divine Comedy, by poets from Italy, the UK, Ireland, USA, Australia, Singapore and India..
My contributions, The Lucifer Event, The Shores of Purgatory and The Shadows of Paradise are on pp.47-50
Outposted: art-poetry collaborations…
Just a glimpse of Valerie Coffin Price's elegant and eloquent 'setting' of my poem adding a point of personal memory and value to a map of the Brecon Beacons, as part of the ambitious wide-ranging Outposted project, "bringing together a wide range of professional and emerging writers, artists, performers and makers, from various locations across the UK, to work in our collective solitude and create art that aims to be compelling, relevant and high quality in content and execution".
This and much other work went on display this Three Storeys exhibition in March of this year.
‘Troeon : Turnings’ – a conversation between poems in Welsh and English
TROEON / TURNINGS
Philip Gross,
Cyril Jones,
Valerie Coffin Price
To turn, to dig, to plough, to upset, to translate… Bend, lap, journey, time... The Welsh word troeon unfolds meaning after meaning.
In TROEON : TURNINGS, two poets confident in their own traditions meet in the hinterland between translation and collaboration - Cyril Jones from the disciplines of Welsh cynghanedd, Philip Gross from the restless variety of English verse.
In the same spirit, Valerie Coffin Price plays an equal part with striking letterpress designs that surprise the language of both writers into new awareness of its possibilities.
ISBN: 9781781726068
https://www.serenbooks.com/productdisplay/troeon-turnings
Published: 2021 £12.99
"A very thoughtful and thought-provoking book," says Mab Jones in Buzz magazine, in a review that's both those things itself. "This admixture of playfulness and profundity makes the book at once intelligent and engaging, giving it depth yet also keeping it accessible."
Get a taster of the landscape and the languages in this YouTube video, Jottings On The Water / Dwfrfyfyrio, the two poets' voices in conversation with each other and the River Taff.
A Monument in Vaikus
My thanks to the quiet thoughtful online space of One Hand Clapping journal for a chance to share this encounter with the history of Estonia, and of part of my family – from a collection-to-be of poems and prose poems dealing with the spirit of Estonia and, in particular, of vaikus, one of several Estonian words for silence.
Voices of the Earth at Woodbrooke is evolving…
Voices of the Earth has been an annual art and poetry course, encouraging serious creative play and cross-fertilisation of art forms underpinned by an awareness of the complexity of life on Earth.
Like other centres and facilities, the Woodbrooke Quaker study centre in Birmingham couldn't be open for onsite events during pandemic restrictions. But we kept the culture of the course alive by taking it online.
In two years on experiment with an interactive course spread flexibly over six weeks, using Zoom and Moodle, with forums and “creative exchange rooms”. we've learned a lot about online ways of working.
In October 2022, the course is morphing into Groundwork, an online creative community running through nine months of the year to come.
Tutors: Philip Gross is a poet, prose writer, and until 2017, Professor of Creative Writing at the University of South Wales. Zélie Gross is a Quaker writer and editor, with a background in making and teaching of visual arts. For both, collaboration is a source of fresh work and delight.