The Shores of Vaikus

By: Philip Gross

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Paperback | 21 January 2024

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Paperback
96 Pages

Dimensions(cm)
21.5 x 13.9 x 0.64

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In this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father's birth, T S Eliot Prizewinner Philip Gross continues to develop the subtle conversation between words and silence that is at the core of his poetry.

At this collection's heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of this book''s central sequence, 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.

Industry Reviews

The Thirteenth Angel, like all Philip Gross's work, fuses the physical and the metaphysical, and lights the profoundest subject matter with shafts of playful humour. He is a poet with exceptional gifts of observation, whether it's a panoramic view of the earth and its inhabitants or 'the mutterings of quiet circumstance / under the threshold of attention'.

-- Jean Sprackland * chair of judges, T.S. Eliot Prize 2022 *

Mastery is what you would wish for in a 27th collection and it is what you find in Philip Gross's The Thirteenth Angel, shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize... His easy, fluent ways with form contrast with his conflicted subject matter. He has a questing eye and now, more than ever, writes to make sense of the world in its inexplicable multiplicity.

-- Kate Kellaway * The Observer (Poetry book of the month) *

Philip Gross's The Thirteenth Angel is a book with its finger firmly on the pulse of the sounds of the contemporary world... Gross uses language which is precise and sharp one moment and then veers into a familiar colloquial style the next, which makes him intensely readable.

-- Mona Arshi * PBS Selector, Poetry Book Society Bulletin, Winter 2022 *

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