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Born in Cornwall, son of an Estonian wartime refugee,Philip Grosshas lived in Plymouth, Bristol and South Wales, where he was Professor of Creative Writing at Glamorgan University (USW). His 27th collection,The Thirteenth Angel(2022), is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and is shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize 2022. It follows eleven previous books with Bloodaxe, includingBetween the Islands(2020),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 2009; andChanges of Address: Poems 1980-1998(2001), his selection from earlier books includingThe Ice Factory, Cat's Whisker, The Son of the Duke of Nowhere, I.D.andThe Wasting Game. SinceThe Air Mines of Mistila(with Sylvia Kantaris, Bloodaxe Books, 1988), he has been a keen collaborator, most recently with artist Valerie Coffin Price onA Fold in the River(2015), with poet Lesley Saunders onA Part of the Main(2018), and with Welsh-languagebarddCyril Jones onTroeon/Turnings(2021).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. Philip Gross's poetry for young people includesManifold Manor, The All-Nite Caf(winner of the Signal Award 1994),Off Road to Everywhere(winner of the CLPE Award 2011) and the poetry-science collectionDark Sky Park(shortlisted for the CLiPPA award 2019).
At the heart of all of Gross's collections has been his deep enquiry into and fascination with the nature of embodiment and existence – what water is and does in The Water Table, the role of language, and speech especially, in identity and the self in Deep Field and Later. Now in Love Songs of Carbon Gross tests and feels his amazed way through the mysteries of the multiple manifestations of love and ageing... Such exactitude of feeling and image is typical of all Gross's work, and no less inventively in this new collection. Characteristic too is his focused, sustained approach across the whole book: Love Songs of Carbon asks to be read as a song-book, to use the terms of its presentation, curated for the reader to turn and return to. From poem to poem, pace and metrics quicken and still and quicken again as the book progresses. -- John Burnside & Jane Draycott * PBS Bulletin *
