Between the Islands

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, 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, 1988), 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 (2009), with photographer Simon Denison, won the Wales Book of the Year Award 2010. He won a Cholmondeley Award in 2017.

The two searching sequences that bookend this collection are not so much elegies as unfinished conversations with friends no longer living – friendships lost or neglected, with their closeness and distances sensitively mapped. This is Philip Gross’s writing at its most hospitable, lit up by a sense of personal address, both tactful and deeply engaged. The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, is more than a metaphor. It is another conversation – with the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross’s 26th book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.

The sea that is always in sight, between us and beyond us, becomes a metaphor in Between the Islands for conversations between separated friends, but it is also the real sea of this planet, used and abused and in need of our care. Between the Islands is Philip Gross's 21st book of poetry, and his 11th from Bloodaxe.