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In this edgy homage to Estonia, the country of his refugee father’s birth, T S Eliot Prizewinner Philip Gross continues to develop the subtle conversation between words and silence that is at the core of his poetry.
At this collection’s heart, the shapeshifting prose-poem monologues of this book's central sequence, Evi And The Devil, weave a haunted landscape out of folktale, dark humour, the routine atrocities of history and a vividly present sense of place. The island of Vaikus (one of several words for silence in Estonian) is Estonia condensed, refracted in the dark waters of a bog pool. The voice that speaks with such compelling otherness is a channelling of a culture and a disposition often drowned out in successive occupations by the empires of the day, but always alive, and whispering. The resulting book is both a bold departure and a drawing together of the whole range of a writing life.
'Philip Gross’s latest collection, his twenty-eighth book, begins and ends with meditations on, among other things, silence. Between these two sections, entitled "Translating Silence", we meet the prose-poetry of Evi and The Devil. […] Alongside his extraordinary yet historically based imaginative quest, he gives us glimpses which allow the reader to centre. For sharing a lifetime of seeing and feeling, and for honing and polishing the lens of his vision/craft, we can be deeply grateful.' – Dana Littlepage Smith, The Friend
‘Paradoxically, The Shores of Vaikus is both a timely and a timeless work. The past is curiously, hauntingly, alive along the shorelines and within the forests of present-day Estonia, the locus of Philip Gross’s latest book. So much is liminal, evanescent […] and the shadow-stories that impel these poems seem all the more chilling at a point in history when old patterns of empire-building are threatening to repeat themselves. […] His tone is modest but his intelligence is fierce. In this his 28th book he’s still seeking to do what the real poets do—to translate the world, and the significance that rests in its silences.’ – Stuart Henson, London Grip
'The Shores of Vaikus is a rich and rewarding collection, thanks largely to the adept deployment of language in ways that provide a welcome aesthetic jolt, but it is also a profound reflection on belonging – not just only to our primary landscape, but to the earth as a whole. [...] It’s a pleasure to read a volume of poetry that is so alert to the multifarious contingencies of history.' – Tom Phillips, The High Window
‘… an extraordinary book, all told. “If the best / of silence could translate to taste / it tastes like this”; and, if the best of poetry could translate to a book, then here it is. Put it on your wish list and get it for your friends today. Just luminous.' – Mab Jones, Buzz Magazine
'Silence, the subject of much of Gross’s previous work, has a watery quality in this book, and his writing about it here is often a transcription into landscape, drawing attention to the lines of water that run across a piece of land seen in vertical profile: sea-levels, the line of the horizon, lines around which small and large and large shifts are continually happening, often very slowly.' – Anna Reckin, Long Poem Magazine
Translating Silence
13 The Old Country
15 Introits
17 A Place Called Vaikus
21 Erratics
25 The Point
26 The Crossing
27 Evi And The Devil
Translating Silence
79 Now, in Vaikus
83 A Monument in Vaikus
88 Five Versions of Vaikus:
88 A forest, a real one
89 If it’s the silence
90 Aside
91 Just when we thought
93 Learning to speak
95 Another Shore