Philip Gross: 10 books

From its opening page -- a refugee's first sight of England -- "Changes of Address" presents a journey through our times, a search for the meaning of 'home'. With its humour and deep honesty, its vivid storytelling, its sense of history and brilliant observations of the here and now, this...

The zero at the heart of these poems is not nothing -not simply absence, forgetting or loss, though there are moving elegies among them. This is a not-quite-definable O that gives surprising edge to life and language round it. Direct, meditative, playful, hyper-alert, Philip Gross's distinctively...

The medieval Mappa Mundi showed the real world hedged about with wonders. Philip Gross's poems in Mappa Mundi are as vividly observed and sometimes fabulous as the traveller's tales of antiquity. Like those creatures in the margins of old maps they are hybrids of real longings, truth and lies. Each...

In his nineties Philip Gross's father, a wartime refugee, began to lose his several languages, first to deafness, then profound aphasia. Deeply thought as well as deeply felt, these poems reach into that gulf to find him -through recovery of histories both spoken and unspoken as well as an excavation...

Challenging and tender, these poems are a rite of passage. Philip Gross's much praised previous collection, Deep Field, explored the loosening connections between the self and language in his refugee father's old age. This new book goes further, through the failing of the body, through the mind's...

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...

In these restlessly exploratory poems and sequences, the space between things is never empty, but alive with messages. Utterly physical even when it is at its most enquiring, Philip Gross’s latest collection contemplates space and sound. Even silence reveals itself as multiple and individual. With...

Love Songs of Carbon is Philip Gross’s 18th book of poetry, and is a coming of age - inhabiting the ageing body with a confident, inventive curiosity. At the same time searching, tender, intellectually agile, unexpected and erotic, this is poetry at home with great shifts of perspective, from the...

Photo kiosks always seem to be tucked away in some dusty corner. Somewhere quiet and so public and yet you're on your own. You put the money in and flash - don't forget to smile. Flash - for the facetaker. Flash - for the fateshaker. Flash - for the soulbreaker!

Sitting on pins and needles, anxiously waiting to see what will happen next, horror audiences crave the fear and exhilaration generated by a terrifying story; their anticipation is palpable. But they also breathe a sigh of relief when the action is over, when they are able to close their books or...