Between the Islands

By Philip Gross

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Mar 26, 2020
• ISBN: 9781780375076

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

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PHILIP GROSS

BETWEEN THE ISLANDS

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.

‘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 by Philip Gross2

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PHILIP GROSS

Between the Islands

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Acknowledgements are due to: Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore, ed. Kirsten Irving (Sidekick Books, 2016); The Book of Love and Loss, ed. R.V. Bailey & June Hall (Belgrave Press, 2014); The Clearing; The Compass; Cordite; Hwaet! 20 Years of Ledbury Poetry Festival, ed. Mark Fisher (Bloodaxe Books, 2016); The Lonely Crowd; Magma; Manhattan Review; Metamorphic: 21st century poets respond to Ovid, ed. Nessa O’Mahoney & Paul Munden Recent Work Press, 2017); The North; Poetry and Place, with art work by Dianne Firth (Belconnen Arts Centre, Canberra, 2017); Poetry Review; Sea-Fever: a collaboration, with Bruno Van Dijck, Mike Perry, Pete Judge & Jeroen Laureyns (De Queeste Art, Watou, Belgium, 2016).

And thanks to: Heather Parnell, for her art work, Pocket Remains (‘Pyroglyphs’); Jenny Pollak and Luis Vidal, for ‘pequeñas cositas de nada’ (‘The House of Innumerable Things’); Mike Perry, for the Sea-Fever collaboration (‘Three Fevers and a Fret’, ‘A Wave’) and Pete Judge (‘Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach’).

The epigraph is from Carnac by Guillevic, translated by John Montague (Bloodaxe Books, 1999).

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CONTENTS

Title Page

Acknowledgements

Epigraph

Edge States

Erasures

Nocturne with a View of the Pier

The Age of Electricity

Touched

A Wave…

Shag, Rampant

Himself

Firepower

Pyroglyphs

Three Fevers and a Fret

Equator

Southern Cross

The House of Innumerable Things

Canberra Rising

The Day of the Things

The Floes

Restoration

Bay Laurel