Book description
Winner of the T. S. Eliot Prize. 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 Môr Hafren, the Severn
Sea. Philip Gross's meditations move with subtle steps between these
shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the ageing 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. 'A book of great clarity and
concentration, continually themed but always lively and alert in its
use of language. Gross takes us from Great Flood to subtly invoked
concerns for our watery planet; this is a mature and determined book,
dream-like inplaces, but dealing ultimately with real questions of
human existence'
-- Simon Armitage, T. S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.
