Philip Gross Readings
'Philip Gross’s latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled ‘Translating Silence’, we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil. […] Alongside his extraordinary yet historically based imaginative quest, he gives us glimpses which allow the reader to centre. For sharing a lifetime of seeing and feeling, and for honing and polishing the lens of his vision/craft, we can be deeply grateful.' – Dana Littlepage Smith, The Friend, on The Shores of Vaikus
Philip Gross's 28th book of poetry, The Shores of Vaikus (his 13th from Bloodaxe), was published in November 2024. In the course of forty years an increasingly subtle conversation has evolved between words and silence at the core of Philip Gross's poetry. This is never more so than in the poems of this new collection, an edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father’s birth.
His previous collection The Thirteenth Angel was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation for Winter 2022, and was shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2022. Philip took part in the T S Eliot Prize Readings at London's Royal Festival Hall on 15 January 2023. In his 2020 collection Between the Islands Philip Gross returned to the theme of water and the sea, one he explored in his T S Eliot Prize-winning 2009 collection The Water Table.
Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee, Philip Gross has lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 28th book of poetry, The Shores of Vaikus, was published by Bloodaxe in 2024. His previous collection, The Thirteenth Angel (2022), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. That followed 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.
An in-depth piece about the poetry of Philip Gross went online on Victoria Moul’s Substack Horace & friends on 23 July 2026 under the standfirst ‘Reading Philip Gross since 1989’. This excellent piece covers various collections published by Philip Gross over the last few decades, with detailed discussion of his two most recent Bloodaxe collections, The Shores of Vaikus, his 28th book of poetry, and The Thirteenth Angel, which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2022.
The article will be available to view for free for four weeks after publication on 23 July 2026, after which it will become subscriber only. Read here.
‘Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Gross’s latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent […] and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. […] His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book he’s still seeking to do what the real poets do—to translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences.’ – Stuart Henson, London Grip
PAST READINGS
Bloodaxe joint online launch event, Friday 8 November 2024
Philip Gross joined Marie Howe and David Constantine as all three poets read from their new books and discussed their work with each other and with Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley.
Available to watch via the video below or on our YouTube channel here: https://youtube.com/live/lEW5RAH5R-g
ONLINE LAUNCH FOR THE THIRTEENTH ANGEL
Tuesday 22 November 2022, 7pm, joint online launch
Bloodaxe Books hosted this online launch reading by Philip Gross and Aleš Šteger celebrating the publication of their new poetry collections.
Both poets read live and discussed their collections with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. This free Bloodaxe launch event was streamed on YouTube Live and is now available to watch below. Aleš Šteger read first in each set.
PAST READINGS FROM BETWEEN THE ISLANDS
Friday 7 May 2021, 6pm, The Stay-at-Home Literary Festival - via Zoom
Solace in Sound – Three Bloodaxe Poets Explore the Landscape of Grief
A trio of Bloodaxe poets whose recent poetry collections span Scotland, Ireland, England and Estonia read for the Stay-at-Home Literary Festival in May 2021. Each shares a powerful sense of their formative landscapes; whether farmland, forest, mountains, estuaries, rivers or beyond. In poems that consider the impact of loss – of friends and friendships, parents, or a communal event of the most traumatic kind – these collections foster sympathy and strength. The poets will read from their own work, and also from each other’s, creating a unique conversation about memory and resonance in the landscape.
With Heidi Williamson, Jane Clarke and Philip Gross. They were reading from their recent collections Return by Minor Road, When the Tree Falls and Between the Islands, and read poems by each other to start and end their own readings. The start of the video below has been cut off - Philip was in the middle of reading 'The Fisherman' from Jane's debut collection The River.
~~~~~
Philip Gross reads from Between the Islands
~~~~
[05 March 2020]
