Bright Acoustic

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 26th collection, Between the Islands (2020), follows ten previous books with Bloodaxe, including A Bright Acoustic (2017), Love Songs of Carbon (2015), winner of the Roland Mathias Poetry Award and a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; Deep Field (2011), a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Water Table (2009), winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; and Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (2001), his selection from earlier books including The Ice Factory, Cat’s Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D. and The Wasting Game. Since The Air Mines of Mistila (with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 2020), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015) and with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018). I Spy Pinhole Eye (Cinnamon Press, 2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He received a Cholmondeley Award in 2017. Philip Gross's poetry for young people includes Manifold Manor, The All-Nite Café (winner of the Signal Award 1994), Off Road to Everywhere (winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collection Dark Sky Park.

'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; 'Love Songs of Carbon... combines a kind of ecological serenity with the poet's continuing close-up fascination with physical matter. In it, geological time, the phases of 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

• 9 Windfarm at Sea 10 Mew 12 Time in the Dingle 31 Back 32 Ten Takes on the Garden 34 Twenty Questions about Green 36 A Cult of Bees 37 Ear Candle 39 Danceuse Cambodgienne 40 A Cadence 41 Stylus 42 The Breath of Things 44 Tir na nOg 45 On Poetic Form: a short essay 46 The Same River: thirteen variations 59 The Margin 63 Railway Weeds 64 Wetland, Thinking 66 Broadleaf Torch Song 68 Descaffolding 70 Specific Instances of Silence 80 Habitation 81 Fratres: Permutations 83 Applause, Applause 85 Blackbird, Descending 88 Written on Light