Another Shore

Philip Gross

It’s the job of the swifts this late July evening — the air almost too humid to cut through, but they do, the slim curved blades of dark they are, against its pink-grey… As we sit, words done for the day, they are shaving the edge of our silence, at the open windows, cutting level and low as if to make themselves particularly heard, each squeal-sweep stripping a sliver off what we are holding in this room. Not diminishing it. Rather, polishing the edges of the space with finer, finer abrasions. Like waves on a shore. They are making it clearer; cut glass or rock crystal come alive with points of light and dark inside… an inside which is just the world around it, all the outside focused inward. Concentrated. Now.

 

                                                                                  *

 

             words
                                                                                          swift

                                                       edges

                      touch by touch

                                                                                finessing

                                    clarity

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Color headshot of Welsh poet Philip Gross

Philip Gross (South Wales, UK) has published nearly 30 collections of poetry in 40 years. His recent The Thirteenth Angel (Bloodaxe, 2022) was shortlisted for the British TS Eliot Prize, which he won in 2009 with The Water Table. He thrives on collaborations, e.g. with Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (Mulfran, 2018), with scientists on the young people’s collection Dark Sky Park (Otter-Barry, 2018) and with artist Valerie Coffin Price and Welsh-language poet Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (Seren, 2021). The Shores of Vaikus, a creative re-inhabiting of Estonia, his refugee father’s birthplace, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024. For more, see: https://www.philipgross.co.uk

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The Shores of Vaikus
Bloodaxe Books
  • Featured book

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.

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