Poetry Book Society Recommendation
The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's poems in Mappa Mundi are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveller's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each is a journey, open-ended and surprising, giving glimpses of the Middle East, the Pacific North-West, or a Europe of lost spas. There is an encounter with Edward Lear in a Balkan republic of Coromandel, there is snow in the outback, plus some impossible countries that you somehow recognise.
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.
Philip Gross won the T.S. Eliot Prize for his 2009 collection The Water Table.
'A book of great clarity and concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book, dream-like in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence' - Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.
'Great poetry is like walking on water. In this paradoxical, humane collection, Philip Gross achieves that miracle' – Polly Clark, Guardian
‘Philip Gross knows how to make silence and suggestion resonate… he touches an alien, intractable dimension… Gross’s poems are about lost bearings and blurred frontiers’ – Terry Eagleton, Independent on Sunday.
‘Haunting, vividly imagined poems, whose fierce intelligence is gentled by the sonorous grace of the language… A considerable poetic talent offers us an elegant and subtle re-evaluation of the modern world’ – Sarah Crown, The Guardian.
‘Some of the poems are marvellous, not because they are brave about their subject, not even because of the technique on display, but because they are electrifyingly well observed and beautifully written’ – David Morley, Poetry Review.
‘This marvellous collection… The poems are destabilising but revelatory visions of the world…The tensions between his close attention to qualities and the wit and bravura with which he interprets them is held by the scope of his linguistic resources and technique… I repeat: buy and view the world anew! – astonished!’ – Judy Gahagan, Ambit.
Philip Gross reads from The Water Table
Philip Gross reads two poems from his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Water Table, 'Sluice Angel' and 'Atlantis World'. This is an extract from a longer film by Pamela Robertson-Pearce of Philip Gross reading his work included in the DVD-anthology, In Person: World Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). He was filmed at home in Penarth, South Wales, in July 2009.
Philip Gross reads from The Wasting Game
Philip Gross reads his sequence The Wasting Game, his fatherly response to his daughter’s anorexia. Another poem from the same book, ‘Imago’, is included at the end, acting as a kind of postscript. Pamela Robertson-Pearce filmed him reading his poems in July 2009 at his home in Penarth. This part of that film session is included in the DVD-anthology, In Person: World Poets (Bloodaxe Books, 2017). First published in 1998, The Wasting Game is included in Philip Gross’s Changes of Address: Poems 1980-1998 (Bloodaxe Books, 2001).
