Description
Book SynopsisThe 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.
Trade ReviewAt 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 focused, 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 *
Table of Contents11 Edge States 14 Erasures 15 Nocturne with a View of the Pier 23 The Age of Electricity 24 Touched 25 A Wave… 28 Shag, Rampant 30 Himself 32 Firepower 34 Pyroglyphs 37 Three Fevers and a Fret 40 Equator 41 Southern Cross 43 The House of Innumerable Things 45 Canberra Rising 48 The Day of the Things 50 The Floes 51 Restoration 54 Bay Laurel 56 A Kind of Rapture 57 Sea Koan 59 How He Lay 60 Flugelhorn on a Pembrokeshire Beach 62 Dear Barber 63 Of the Silence at the Heart of Pyrotechnics 64 Between the Islands 79 Towards a Line from Guillevic
