Philip Gross's The Shores of Vaikus reviews & radio
Philip Gross's 28th book of poetry The Shores of Vaikus was published by Bloodaxe Books in November 2024. It followed The Thirteenth Angel (2022), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize 2022. He is a previous winner of this award, having won the TS Eliot Prize 2009 for his collection The Water Table.
The Shores of Vaikus features poems of homage to Estonia, the country of Philip Gross's refugee father’s birth. The long central prose-poem monologues of 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.
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.
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
Horace & friends, Reading Philip Gross since 1989, online on Substack 23 July 2026
An in-depth piece about the poetry of Philip Gross has gone online on Victoria Moul’s Substack Horace & friends under the standfirst ‘Reading Philip Gross since 1989’. Victoria has been following Philip Gross’s work since she was given his book Manifold Manor (Faber & Faber) at the age of 9. This excellent piece covers various collections published over the years, with detailed discussion of Philip Gross's 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 single most consistent theme in Gross is not what we can do with language, but what we can’t: linguistic failures, forgotten words, lost languages, aphasia, profound silence. The Vaikus of his most recent collection, for example, is the name of an island in Estonia, the country his father was from, but also a word for silence; and the collection is about both the landscape of Estonia and what it’s like to speak only a little of the language [….] I am very glad that I first read Philip Gross in 1989, and have had the pleasure and privilege of listening to him all these years.’ – Victoria Moul, Horace & friends, on the poetry of Philip Gross
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.
https://vamoul.substack.com/p/one-of-the-lesser-order-of-recording
Victoria Moul reviewed Philip Gross’s T S Eliot Prize-shortlisted collection The Thirteenth Angel online in The Friday Poem on 13 January 2023. She considered his 27th book of poetry in the context of his work as a whole. The review is no longer available on TFP following a website hack, but Victoria drew on it for the above piece on her Substack.
‘Philip Gross has been publishing poetry for more than forty years and this is an experienced collection in all senses of the word: full of literary expertise but also the pleasures and tolls of maturity…. ‘Angel’ means ‘messenger’, and this sense of poetry’s communicative power – at once modest and metaphysical – is the defining feature of this memorable, strange and often beautiful collection.’ – Victoria Moul, The Friday Poem, on The Thirteenth Angel
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
Long Poem Magazine, online 10 May 2025
An in-depth review of Philip Gross’ new collection The Shores of Vaikus went online in Long Poem Magazine on 10 May 2025.
'Silence, the subject of much of Gross’s previous work, has a watery quality in this book, and his writing about it here is often a transcription into landscape, drawing attention to the lines of water that run across a piece of land seen in vertical profile: sea-levels, the line of the horizon, lines around which small and large and large shifts are continually happening, often very slowly.' – Anna Reckin, Long Poem Magazine, on The Shores of Vaikus
https://longpoemmagazine.org.uk/reviews/4136/
London Grip, online 27 February 2025
A brilliant review of Philip Gross’ new collection The Shores of Vaikus went online in London Grip on 27 February 2025. Reviewer Stuart Henson is particularly impressed with the prose-poem monologues of Evi And The Devil, writing: ‘the central sequence, Evi and the Devil, strikes me as an outstanding achievement: original, subtle, and free of judgement.’
‘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
https://londongrip.co.uk/2025/02/london-grip-poetry-review-philip-gross-2/
REGIONAL RADIO READING BY PHILIP GROSS
The Poetry Place with Philip Gross, Episode #61, West Wilts Radio, Sunday 26 January 2025, 3pm
Philip Gross was guest poet on West Wilts Radio’s The Poetry Place on 26 January. He was reading poems from his new collection The Shores of Vaikus, his 28th book of poetry.
Philip read and introduced his poems ‘The Old Country’ and ‘The Crossing’. He read from the central sequence of prose poem monologues ‘Evi And The Devil’. Philip described Evi as a character who had escaped from a novel he never wrote, and thinks of her voice as being the voice of the place – Estonia. He concluded by reading ‘Learning to speak’, the penultimate poem in The Shores of Vaikus.
Philip is introduced by co-host Dawn Gorman at the top of the show. Philip features from 26:09.
https://westwiltsradio.com/shows/the-poetry-place-with-philip-gross-61_26-1-25/
ONLINE REVIEW COVERAGE
The High Window, online 2 January 2025
Excellent reviews of Philip Gross’s new collection The Shores of Vaikus, Nia Broomhall’s prize-winning debut poetry pamphlet Backalong, and David Constantine’s new translation A Bird Called Elaeus: poems for here and now from The Greek Anthology all feature in the January 2025 issue of The High Window.
'The Shores of Vaikus is a rich and rewarding collection, thanks largely to the adept deployment of language in ways that provide a welcome aesthetic jolt, but it is also a profound reflection on belonging – not just only to our primary landscape, but to the earth as a whole. [...] It’s a pleasure to read a volume of poetry that is so alert to the multifarious contingencies of history.' – Tom Phillips, The High Window
https://thehighwindowpress.com/2025/01/02/the-high-window-reviews-2-january-2025/#Philip%20Gross
REVIEW COVERAGE
Buzz Magazine, December 2024
A brilliant review of Philip Gross’s new collection The Shores of Vaikus, his 28th book of poetry, featured in Mab Jones’s December poetry round-up in the Welsh magazine Buzz.
‘… an extraordinary book, all told. “If the best / of silence could translate to taste / it tastes like this”; and, if the best of poetry could translate to a book, then here it is. Put it on your wish list and get it for your friends today. Just luminous.' – Mab Jones, Buzz magazine
In print. Also available online here.
The Friend, Friday 13 September 2024
A very early but excellent in-depth review of Philip Gross’s collection The Shores of Vaikus was featured in the Quaker magazine The Friend of 13 September 2024.
‘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
Featured in print over two pages. Also available online without subscription.
https://thefriend.org/article/the-shores-of-vaikus
ONLINE LAUNCH EVENT
Online launch reading by Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine, Friday 8 November 2024
Marie Howe, Philip Gross and David Constantine celebrated the publication of their new titles, all published by Bloodaxe in November 2024. All three poets read live and discussed their work with each other and with the host, Bloodaxe editor Neil Astley. Available now via YouTube.
[04 November 2024]
