The Shores of Vaikus (and The Thirteenth Angel)

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

Published: 14 August, 2024

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