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The Shores of Vaikus
The Shores of Vaikus in Bloomington, MN
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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.
'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 E
vi 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
‘Paradoxically,
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
'
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
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.
'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 E
vi 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
‘Paradoxically,
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
'
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
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