Philip Gross

The Water Table

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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 Mr 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.
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37 printed pages
Original publication
2011
Publication year
2011
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Quotes

  • kellhkound10has quoted9 years ago
    Sluice Angel

    Low tide at the sea lock,
    a forty foot drop to muddy shallows…
    One boat’s width
    of channel that the dredger grubs up
    daily… Silt to one side scored in circles
    where they dragged for don’t ask what…
    The tall shut doors of the hall
    of the world at which the weight of water,
    of incipience, does not need to knock:
    feel it there like a shudder
    of difference, the engine of change.
    Now, almost soundless, hinges shift.
    With a gradual calibrated rip
    like a concord of lathes, with a crypt smell,
    two green-grey-brown stiffening blades
    of water fold in. They curve, feathering
    themselves in free fall: wings
    flexed, shuddering, not to soar
    but to pour themselves down, to earth
    the charge, liquid solid as rock
    and untouchable, trouncing itself
    to a froth, to exhaustion, till with a sigh
    the gates can open, and the world,
    our world, small craft, come through.
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