Nearly two years now since the publication of The Thirteenth Angel, which received some fine thoughtful reviews after its moment in the sunlight of the TS Eliot shortlist… and The Shores of Vaikus appears from Bloodaxe on November 21st.
This book feels like a keeping of faith with Estonia – vaikus is one of several Estonian words for silence, in a positive sense – not this time through the lens of my father’s early life and exile but from my own visits there since independence more than 30 years ago. The voice that speaks in the prose poems of Evi and the Devil, in the centre of the book, still surprises me. It surely isn’t mine. I just have to trust that I’ve been hearing something that’s real, of Estonia’s own.
"If I sit still enough, the birds hop closer. Insects blunder onto me en route to flowers on the other side. Finally, the dead unpeel the papery crust of non-existence, and step out blinking in the sun."
"It’s been no time at all, geologically speaking, since this was a sea bed. That’s still where I go to sleep some nights. Down in the kelp forest. I should stay there really – better for everyone – but my nerve fails, so I stomp my feet in the silt, till it swirls, and what the world calls history begins to rise."
THE SHORES OF VAIKUS. Publication Date : 21 Nov 2024. Paperback. £12.00. 9781780377179
'The Thirteenth Angel, like all Philip Gross’s 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 it’s 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
THE THIRTEENTH ANGEL. Publication Date : 17 Nov 2022. Paperback. £12.00. 9781780376356
Congratulations to collaborators Glenn Davidson of Artstation, dramatist Wyn Mason and sound engineer Mike Fedeski as the website of the Flat Holm Art Project goes live, with my poems woven into Glenn's interactive 3D map of the island as well as full voice recordings and texts of the sequences The Wind on Echni and Small Saints and Sundry Presences. Explore these plus Wyn's monologues and Mike's soundscapes – and thus the island – on https://art.flatholmisland.com/home/
Ynys Echni/Flat Holm is an island midstream in Môr Hafren/the Severn Estuary, a Site of Special Scientific Interest and Local Nature Reserve, managed by Cardiff Council. Our team visited and stayed on the island at intervals from 2022, sometimes in company with 20,000 nesting gulls.
My thanks and much respect to Hamish and Rebecca of the Garsdale Retreat, high in the Yorkshire Dales, for establishing a place for quietly intensive writing/tutoring and fine feeding, up among the the calls of lapwing, curlew and (while I was there, late April) Spring lambs. For a sense of that spaciousness, a view from the garden to the next-door neighbours...
Thanks too to thoughtfully exact and musical guest reader Katharine Towers and to all the members of a friendly, focussed, mutually supportive group, who tried everything I dared them to, however perverse, and used it produce writing which was gloriously different, utterly their own.
Friday 22 March – a warm welcome in The Hours Cafe and Bookshop, Brecon for two old friends, ex-colleagues and fellow long-haul practitioners of poetry to read together, in an event that also honoured the memory of late poet friends Anne Cluysenaar and Ruth Bidgood.
Saturday 10th March, 2024... and a loose group of writers, artists and musicians who meet once a month for a Serendip Tea at the Turner House Gallery, Penarth, came together for an afternoon of Poetry On Show in many guises. There were:
- ...the poetry of smells (with real perfumes) by Lesley James,
- ...audio + cut up / paper installation by Sophie Buchaillard,
- ...poetry jewellery by Mab Jones,
- ...poems in performance by Luca Paci and myself, with music from Chris Glynn and Mac Elton.
…not to mention the presiding spirit of Karl Blossfeldt (1854-1932) whose hauntingly cool precise, sometimes microscopic images of previously unnoticed plant forms surrounded us and challenged us to look and think.
Our thanks to the curators, and to the Hayward Gallery, London South Bank, whose travelling exhibition this was. It leaves me with a sequence of fifteen poems in response to the Blossfeldt (click here for one: Blossfeldt form) wondering where they might go next or what they’ll lead to.
berlin lit is an elegant and lively international online quarterly journal for new poetry in English, founded in 2022 by Matthew McDonald, Australian musician and poet living in Berlin, and rapidly establishing itself as an attractive place to be and to meet a range of thoughtful and surprising voices.
Click here for Issue 6 just out. Thanks to them for accepting my Mist Fugue and The Long Acoustics.
Another example of the lithe and exnterprising new life flowing into the poetry world online, ANTHROPOCENE publishes new work – poems and translations – every Wednesday and Sunday, as well as a fortnighty newletter.
All this is available on their site here, including these contributions from me – Limestone Singing and To Seed... and Catchment and Feather on the Pillow . Several of these comes from an ongoing project, begun during the pandemic, of walking the marginal land here round Penarth.
BAD LILIES is an example of the fertile, fresh world of quality online poetry magazines – bi-monthly, coming up to its 18th issue, quickly attracting an impressive list of names, established and new.
If you haven't met it yet, use these poems of mine, The Water Feature and Settlers, as a gateway to exploring so much more. Or these, in the brand new issue 18, Night Work on the Reactor and A Prospect of the Baltic. (Other rich and varied poems in this issue by Michaela Coplen, Rebecca Watts, David Yezzi, Derek Webster, Claire Crowther, John Redmond, Mary Ford Neal, Lisa Kelly, Patrick Davidson Roberts, Katrina Naomi, Gareth Prior.)
MODRON: Writing on Nature & the Ecological Crisis is now on its third issue, and drawing in a wide range of quality work – poems, articles, reviews and blog posts – by some of the most interesting writers from Wales and beyond.
Click here to see two poems of mine, Transmigrations and Windthrow – and also a contribution to a month-long series of writing prompts, this one with an eye to the conversations, often fraught, potentially creative, between languages: Macaronic.
And then, of course, spend time exploring the wealth of content of the Modron site here.
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.
