Philip Gross - Böcker

Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross's 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.

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.

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 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.Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.

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, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022.

In the course of forty years an increasingly subtle conversation has evolved between words and silence at the core of Philip Gross's poetry. This is never more so than in the poems of this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father’s birth.At this collection’s heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of Evi And The Devil weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.The Shores of Vaikus is Philip Gross’s 28th book of poetry, and his 13th from Bloodaxe, following The Thirteenth Angel (2022), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Coming to South Wales, TS Eliot-Prize winning poet Philip Gross lived on the banks of the River Taff near Quakers Yard. Here, his poems and journals from that encounter meet the visual responses of artist Valerie Coffin Price grounded, through walking, in an immediate engagement with place. Together they in-fold past and present landscapes, in a subtle creative conversation with each other's art, as well as with the river itself. The result is A Fold in the River, a stunning collection of poetry and original artwork.Philip Gross's poetry collection The Water Table won the T.S.Eliot Prize in 2009, I Spy Pinhole Eye, with photographer Simon Denison, won Wales Book of The Year 2010, and Off Road To Everywhere won the CLPE Award for Children's Poetry 2011. Deep Field (2011) and Later (2013) deal with ageing and language, seen through his father's final years and deep aphasia. He has published ten novels for young people, and collaborated with artists, musicians, dancers and puppeteers. Another recent collaboration centred on the river Taff, with film-maker Wyn Mason, created the interactive poetry-film website Flow and Frame.

TROEON : TURNINGS is the fruit of a creative collaboration between English Language poet Philip Gross and Welsh language poet Cyril Jones. The work is further enlivened with cover and text designs by fine artist Valerie Coffin Price. The poems feature watery themes and are primarily inspired by a myriad of rivers ‘…on their separate ways to articulation: north south east/ west, toward opposite coasts…’. Cyril Jones also contributes some English translations of his own Welsh poems and Philip Gross writes directly in response to Cyril’s contributions.The creative conversation between the two has produced a wider range of poems than expected, with several themes begging to be pursued: the flowing of water, the different rivers central to each writer’s life, the life-stories associated with them, and the translation process itself. Both poets have been drawn into exploring the ‘space between’ the two languages, in which words and meanings can be ‘turned’ in several senses. The poets share both a love of precise and allusive description and a predilection for the ever-flowing wildness of the natural world: ‘The melody and counter-melody/a strange combination of Cerdd Dafod, Cerdd Dant/two halves awakening common memories.’There is a gorgeous dialogue-like section of concise ‘englynion’ aside translated versions in a central section devoted to birds. An image of the waters ‘flowing backwards’ brings us the storied history of the regions along the riverbanks, from ‘neolithic bones’ through medieval monks and printer-priests, onwards to the Industrial revolution, and then touches on the contemporary where occasionally bitterness still arises, although now the (Severn) ‘Bridge is Free’ there is always the pressure of the past and the jousting play of two languages: ‘ambivalent flick of meanings,/ tilting like feelings – always forked’.Valerie Price is a known for her fine-art installations inspired by the nature. Her Letterpress designs take their themes and forms from the poetry text of Gross and Jones. She uses large lettering, overlapping outlines, text in columns, inventive formatting, shading and spacing. Printed in an accessible standard format for poetry collections, TROEON : TURNINGS is an artful play of variations using visuals and voices, both beautifully lyrical and profoundly thoughtful.

From its opening page – a refugee’s first sight of England – Changes of Address presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of ‘home’. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this book of poems is as rich and multi-layered as a novel. It brings together for the first time the whole range of Philip Gross’s poetry from the 1980s and 90s – a generous selection from his Bloodaxe, Faber and Peterloo collections along with uncollected poems and work from limited editions and collaborations. Changes of Address shows his development from the prize-winning Ice Factory to the Whitbread-shortlisted Wasting Game, but takes the reader also into previously unknown reaches of Philip Gross territory. It does not cover his later work. He won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table. Poetry Book Society Special Commendation.

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 a not-quite-definable zero that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching new collection that addresses both the mind and heart. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love and ageing, or in the gaps between words. Heady and sobering, unsettling, celebratory, they come home with findings from the real world of the senses, heart and mind.

Winner of the T.S. Eliot 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 Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging 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.

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 The Water Table will find those qualities brought to a new human urgency in the compelling sequences of Deep Field.

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.

worm dreamingdreaming root and branchand whale and antand dinosaur anddreamingyou and meBlack smokers, glacier worms and tardigrades… arctic terns, snow leopards and the Aleppo cat… living in the Abyss, conquering Everest, marvelling at the Northern Lights.An exciting and thought-provoking celebration of all that is extraordinary in the natural world. Includes fascinating information about the creatures depicted.