Search results for ""Author Philip Gross""

Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. A powerful and ambiguous body of water lies at the heart of these poems, with shoals and channels that change with the forty-foot tide. Even the name is fluid - from one shore, the Bristol Channel, from the other Mor Hafren, the Severn Sea. Philip Gross' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging body and that ever-present mystery, the self. Admirers of his work know each new collection is a new stage; this one marks a crossing into a new questioning, new clarity and depth.

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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.

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The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing - not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable zero that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively wide range of tones work together in a subtle, searching new collection that addresses both the mind and heart. 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.

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Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's weakening hold on the borderline between the present and the traumas of the past. It follows the journey to the end - then beyond, to the tentative byways through which mourning moves. With an instinct for form that both controls and releases depths of feeling, Philip Gross writes poetry that proves it can be trusted with the most raw yet essential things of life.

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In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him - through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation of the spoken word itself. Readers who admired Philip Gross's subtlety and range in his T.S. Eliot Prize-winning collection The Water Table will find those qualities brought to a new human urgency in the compelling sequences of Deep Field.

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Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross's 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age - inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the outer edge of science to the sensations at our fingertips. These are love poems, both to the person and to the body itself, even as - especially as - it faces entropy and decay.

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This book provides a sustained exploration of creativity. Philip Gross provides a poem, 'Cave diver in the deep reach', and an extended commentary on how the poem was written. These are followed by contributions from typographer Jeremy Tankard, whose unique 'Redisturbed' typeface is used throughout this book, and artist Rika Newcombe, who provides the cover image. Caves of making offers the textual equivalent of a creative festival - a festival on the page. It brings together the work of three remarkable creatives and offers, in their own words, insights into their creative process. Philip Gross is a writer of many parts - spanning poetry, thought-provoking fiction for young people, schools opera libretti, radio short stories and plays. Collaboration with the visual arts, dance, music and other art forms has been one of the sources of energy in his writing life. Jeremy Tankard has built a worldwide reputation for the high quality and unique designs of his typefaces. In the development of the Redisturbed typeface chosen for Caves of making, he wanted to take the idea of a unicase alphabet much further than previous experiments and treat it as a conventional text type.Rika Newcombe's paintings have an uncanny sympathy with the world of creative writing. Images from her work grace the covers of all books in the Creative Writing Studies series.

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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.

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The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's new poems are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveler'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. These poems explore the spaces that can open between buildings in a city street, in the shifting lights of love aging, 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. A Poetry Book Society Recommendation.

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With each new collection, Philip Gross’ poems extend their conversation between the metaphysical and the acutely physical. His sequences in The Thirteenth Angel scan from moment to moment like flickering needles, registering stress patterns in the world around us – ebbs and flows of weather or events, in our own bodies, in the city streets before and after the pandemic, or on the autoroutes of Europe with their undertow of human flight. If there are angels, they are nothing otherworldly, but formed by angles of incidence between real immediate things, sudden moments of clarity that may disturb, calm or exhilarate. The Thirteenth Angel is Philip Gross’s 27th book of poetry, and his 12th from Bloodaxe, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022.

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worm dreaming dreaming root and branch and whale and ant and dinosaur and dreaming you and me Black smokers, glacier worms and tardigrades… arctic terns, snow leopards and the Aleppo cat… living in the Abyss, conquering Everest, marvelling at the Northern Lights. An exciting and thought-provoking celebration of all that is extraordinary in the natural world. Includes fascinating information about the creatures depicted.

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