A Bright Acoustic

By Philip Gross

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Jul 3, 2017
• ISBN: 9781780373690

Philip Gross

Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol, and latterly South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, including Between the Islands (2020), 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 2009; 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, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015), with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018), and with Welsh-language bardd Cyril Jones on Troeon/Turnings (2021). 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 (shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).

Book preview

PHILIP GROSS

A BRIGHT ACOUSTIC

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.

‘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 focussed, 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

Cover photograph © John Atherton King 2014

PHILIP GROSS

A Bright Acoustic

for the many others, living and dead,

with whom these poems are a conversation

Clarity

In the sense of transparence,

I don’t mean that much can be explained

Clarity in the sense of silence.

GEORGE OPPEN

, ‘Of Being Numerous’

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to: A Festschift for Tony Frazer, Amsterdam Review, English, Geohumanities, International Literary Quarterly, Journal of Arts and Communities, Manhattan Review, New Welsh Reader, New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, Poetry Daily, The Poetry Review, RSPB Anthology of Wildlife Poetry, Scintilla, The High Window, The Reader; and to Manchester University Press for poems included in Halfway-to-Whole Things: Ecologies of Writing and Collaboration in Extending Ecocriticism, ed. Peter Barry.

Some of the poems appeared in Time in the Dingle, IPSI Chapbook 1 (International Poetry Studies Institute, University of Canberra, 2015). ‘Applause, Applause’ was commissioned by Festival of Sound: The Sound of English Poetry, Magdalene College, Cambridge. The Heraclitus variations formed the text of Flow & Frame, a poetry-film collaboration with Wyn Mason and Kevin Mills.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Windfarm at Sea

Not the sound but the texture

Mew

Time in the Dingle

Back

Ten Takes on the Garden

Twenty Questions about Green

A Cult of Bees

Ear Candle

Danseuse Cambodgienne

A Cadence

Stylus

The Breath of Things

Tír na nÓg

On Poetic Form: a short essay

The Same River: thirteen variations on Heraclitus

The Margin

Railway Weeds

Wetland, Thinking

Broadleaf Torch Song

Descaffolding

Specific Instances of Silence

Habitation

Fratres: Permutations on Arvo Pärt

Applause, Applause

Blackbird, Descending

Written on Light

About the Author

Copyright

Windfarm at Sea

Wind flowers

                         in the mist

as if dark-grown, as spindly as whims,

off the grey coast where there’s no horizon

but one we infer, where they walk

or sleepwalk, in their middle distance

of just-possibility

                                  considering all this

in their