The Water Table
Published on 19. November 2009
Book
Paperback/Softback
64 pages
978-1-85224-852-9 (ISBN)
Description
Winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize 2009. 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' meditations move with subtle steps between these shifting grounds and those of the man-made world, the aging 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.
Reviews / Votes
'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 in places, but dealing ultimately with real questions of human existence' - Simon Armitage, T.S. Eliot Prize judges' comment.More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Tyne and Wear
United Kingdom
Dimensions
Height: 217 mm
Width: 139 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
109 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-85224-852-9 (9781852248529)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
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Person
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.