The North End of the Possible

Reviews / Votes

A poet of genuine promise revelling in the discovery of his natural lyric gift -- Ron Butlin * Sunday Herald books of the year feature * Andrew Philip [is a poet] not merely of promise but of attainment. -- Donny Rourke * The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Scottish Literature * The Ambulance Box is Andrew Philip's first full collection of verse ... and in it he delights readers with a dance through images and words that express powerful visionary and spiritual experiences. ... Philip adds to the texture of his poems with words that are precisely idiomatic and have a consistency of tone which never falters throughout this collection of wide-ranging, but firmly located, voices, that encourage us to explore the visual and linguistic connections that link art with faith and uncertainty; art with loss and discovery; and art with the artist. -- Rosie Sheppard * Magma Poetry * There are countless poems or collections that successfully achieve the cathartic effect - for me at least - so I thought I'd do a whistle-stop tour of just some of what I'd term my own `cathartic greatest hits' ... I was swept away by Andrew Philip's recent collection The Ambulance Box as a whole, but also by individual poems. The elegy `Lullaby', just eight lines long, written for a baby who died, culminates in the couplet


this is the man you fathered -


his voided love, his writhen pride and grief


Perhaps it's the word `fathered' recast, and then the Anglo-Saxon `writhen' carrying with it the weight of history, that together generate such charge. -- Jacqueline Saphra * Magma Poetry Newsletter * [one] of the collections (let alone debut collections) of the year. -- Matt Merritt I read this book from beginning to end in one sitting. Why? Because it is not only good, it is compulsive. Andrew Philip uses poetry as a tool to discover new truths about his personal experience and the experience of people and communities around him. He does this with rare economy, resonant imagery, compassion and insight. He loves language, all three of the tongues of Scotland ..., and he uses English and Scots writing to their strengths. He knows when to sign off and he genuinely understands that less means more but avoids obscurity. He writes about what matters to people. He cares. -- John Hudson * Markings * Salt cements its reputation for fresh contemporary poetry with this much-anticipated second full collection from acclaimed Scottish poet Andrew Philip. Humour and invention are mainstays of Philip's work, and in both English and Scots, his wit leads us gently into a nuanced exploration of existence, remoteness and belonging. -- Colin Begg * The List *