The Water Table
Centered on water and its shifting meanings, the collection explores embodiment, language, landscape, and the self.
Work Information
Water, body, and landscape slip into the same current.
The Water Table uses water as its governing metaphor to reconnect bodily awareness, landscape, memory, and language. Quiet observation opens into deep reflection.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Bloodaxe Books Ltd
- Published
- 2010-02-15
- Pages
- 64 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 13.46 x 0.51 x 21.08 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9781852248529
- ISBN-10
- 1852248521
- Price
- 2834 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/Poetry/British
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'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.
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 26th collection, Between the Islands (2020), follows ten previous books with Bloodaxe, including 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; 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, 2020), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price on A Fold in the River (2015) and with poet Lesley Saunders on A Part of the Main (2018). 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.
Reviews
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loved this book - we read poetry every morning - just half a dozen or so, before we get up to face the day - and as a fellow Quaker and poet - this was a particular joy
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Brilliance in poetry is no easy feat. Here are poems with edge and a distinctive voice, individual and appealing. There are poems with a polished, focused feel. They reveal and thrive upon a confidence the poet has developed over several worthy collections. Gross writes with energy, verve, a true love for language and the interruptions the extraordinary came make into the seemingly mundane. There are quiet poems and poems with a more abstract energy. This collection really needs to be read over time and re-read. Reflect and return. The well-crafted longer sequences stand out for me, as poetry that will always offer something to a reader over time. I prefer the poems with a present human insight, rather than those directly responding to a landscape, for example. If at times this books feels just a little too taut, a little honed, then perhaps the next collection will have a wider focus and be ever more revealing? Highly recommended.
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I bought a second copy for my son in Canada. Memories of the Severn and of bridges and estuaries are part of life's poetry Tim Fletcher
Related Literary Awards
- T. S. Eliot Prize Edition 17 (2009) ・Winner